


Glass, Darkly

by AdamantEve



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Implied death of a major character, Jughead Jones & Ethel Muggs Friendship, Paranormal, creepiness, ghost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2019-11-13 22:24:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18040208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdamantEve/pseuds/AdamantEve
Summary: Jughead Jones is searching for answers and finds them in the dark reflection of glass. Was he going mad? Or was he really talking to the ghost of the ever fascinating and mesmerizingly intelligent haunt of Betty Cooper?





	1. Don't be afraid of the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shrugheadjonesthethird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shrugheadjonesthethird/gifts), [doodlingstories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doodlingstories/gifts).



> This story was inspired by [doodlingstories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doodlingstories/pseuds/doodlingstories) (@buggiesincrowns) with her lovely prompt, which you can read [here](https://writeradamanteve.tumblr.com/post/183102662662/this-beautiful-piece-of-art-and-inspiration-was). I've wrapped layers around that prompt since then, but I could not have written so much of it without her inspiration. 
> 
> A lot of inspiration also came from [@shrugheadjonesthethird](https://shrugheadjonesthethird.tumblr.com/) who created the incredible work of art accompanying this story.

 

 

Art and inspiration provided by @shrugheadjonesthethird 

* * *

 

 

Riverdale High was haunted.

Not figuratively, but literally.

That’s what Jughead believed.

He hadn’t said that out loud to anyone and he never would, because nothing gets your ass kicked faster in the halls of a highschool than exposing your weird underbelly to the jocks and toughs, but he was convinced that there was a restless spirit in their midst, so even if that sort of topic was not something one brought up at the lunch table, he wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t true.

He didn’t notice it immediately. It took some time.

Weeks after Southside High was shut down for reasons cooked up by greed and men, and its students transplanted into the hallowed halls of this northside jewel of a school, newly transferred senior student, Jughead Jones noticed the misplaced shade along the walls.

He didn’t immediately think it was a ghost, either.  For a while he managed to convince himself that it was just a trick of the eye.

He lacked sleep, for one. It was difficult to get a full night when the walls of the trailer he lived in were thin and the neighborhood was rough. He was also fully aware that he was prone to getting sucked in by conspiracy theories, albeit trending more towards the realm of real-world shady dealings and government corruption—he left Ancient Aliens and time travelers to the quacks--but when, alone in the abandoned Blue and Gold office, he noticed the cast of a shadow that had no logical origin, he began to wonder if those absurd ghost hunters weren’t on to something.

 

***************

 

He liked to observe, and he was just strange enough to his friends that they let his silence cloak him like a blanket amidst the noise.

When the rancour of people surrounded him, he would sink into the creases between chaos and watch.

Other kids liked to jump into the fray, but Jughead preferred to be several steps back from it for as long as he could go unnoticed.

The value of observation was lost on the youth, he thought, as if his eighteen wisened years excluded him.

The circumstances of his life made him feel old, and his feelings weren’t completely absurd.

He’d had to fend for himself since he was nine, the ones expected to guide him continuously absent from his life.   He learned early that acting without thinking could get him seriously hurt, if not killed.

His “friends” wore leather jackets with a gang patch of a snake. He was given his own jacket because his uncle was a member of that gang. He wore the jacket because it made him blend in with the other toughs in school, and because the snake was quite well known, the beatings stopped, too.

Some people were afraid of him, some thought him inconsequential, and he liked that, because it afforded him moments of quiet contemplation, where he saw things nobody else did, like the shadow that was cast even when no one was around.

 

*****************

And because he believed that a ghost was roaming the halls of Riverdale, there had to be a death--on the premises or within the vicinity.

At least that’s what those ghost hunting shows said. Ghosts almost always had to come from somewhere, and they were either residual or intelligent.

Residual hauntings were just imprints of past events, a highlight reel of history that played over and over again, never changing, ever repeating.

Intelligent hauntings were more the stuff of horror stories, souls moving between the realm of the living and the dead for their own reasons—usually nefarious ones if the movies were to be believed.

At this point in Jughead’s investigation—because he had begun to call it that—it was hard to say.

He didn’t have money to burn on fancy ghost hunting equipment, and he didn’t have mediums or spiritualists on speed dial. The ones he found in Greendale charged for their services, therefore they were an option Jughead couldn’t afford.

Thomas Topaz, one of the Southside Serpents founding members and descended from the Uktena tribe that once roamed these lands before it was called Riverdale, recommended a Shaman he knew, and though the Shaman claimed he needed no payment, he only knew how to drive spirits away, not to summon them for a curious junior investigator to interview.

Jughead decided that he would have to find this ghost on his own, in the only way he knew how: research.

And a handy digital camera he managed to buy two years ago for cheap on weBay.

He stayed after school and took pictures of the emptied classrooms and hallways, staircases and quiet corners, and the echoing chambers of shower rooms and basements.

The records came next.

When he wasn’t looking through articles in the library’s microfilm, or looking through old yearbooks, he was interviewing the local historian.

They couldn’t tell him much.

There were deaths and tragedies in Riverdale for sure, but none so close to the school or in it.

Nothing was triggering any hunches. His instincts weren’t ringing. Nothing fit remotely with the what he thought he was seeing—until he looked at his photographs again.

His pictures of the trophy case were nondescript at first glance.

He had passed them over quickly, with nothing out of the ordinary, but one evening, in a fit of frustration, he scanned the images one more time, opening them in the hacked Lightroom application he scored from one of the more tech savvy members of their gang.

He adjusted his settings of brightness, contrast, and hue, saving the settings so he can apply them over and over onto each photograph.

He made the shadows pop, and that was when he saw it.

It was an outline. Set against the side of the trophy case was a profile of a face--a forehead, a nose, and a chin. It was hard to tell what sort of face it actually was. Its features, if any, looked delicate, but that could just be the angle of the light.

He went to bed filled with thoughts of this disembodied face.

_Who are you, spirit?_

 

*************

 

Jughead walked by that trophy case countless times since the transfer and it never held any kind of interest to him. It was filled with faces he didn’t know, and the handful that he did recognize--his father, his father’s best friend, a few other local legends, he didn’t care to reminisce about.  

But the otherwise uninteresting cabinet was now an object of curiosity.

It grabbed his attention--made him want to stop and look. His eyes would swerve in its direction whenever he passed it by.  It preoccupied his thoughts. So much so that in the middle of English class, he raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom.

He was given a pass, and as he spilled out into the mostly empty hallway, he headed straight for the trophy case.

This time of day, the halls were dimly lit.  In an eco-friendly effort, the school let natural lighting illuminate the hallways between classes. The lights were on a timer, so at the moment, there was light and shadow everywhere.

The trophy case was nestled in shadow. What light was coming from the windows nearby was not casting its light on the case. He checked around the case, noting where and _when_ the rays of the sun would hit it, where a face could possibly be cast and hit the side of it.

The window was high up towards the ceiling, and he dug into his pockets for the folded printout of the photo he took, staring at the image and holding it up to figure out where a person would have to be standing to cast a shadow like the one in the photo.

He had marked the time of day the photograph was taken. It was after school, when the sun came at a certain angle.

Too close to the light source and the shadow would be taller.  The detail on this profile, the way it shaped itself against the dark wood--it would have to have been standing _right there,_ almost right in the path of his camera.

He walked around the case. Maybe the phantom was just hanging around. Maybe there was really nothing in this case that attracted the spirit.

He looked at the trophies, first, but it held no meaning for him. This had never been his school, so it didn’t matter if they were division champions or runners up of anything.

The photographs were more interesting. His father’s photo with his teammates held a prominent place in the case.  As captain of the football team, his father led Riverdale high to win back-to-back championships in their division, and almost got them a third, if he hadn’t suddenly quit and joined the Serpents--for whatever reason people ruined their futures.

There were newer photographs of athletes just slightly older than Jughead, some of which included faces he actually sat with at class.

He walked to the side of the case where he saw the shadow and realized that the case didn’t just hold athletic achievements. There were academic awards there, too, for various disciplines--STEM, arts, journalism, and debate. There were pictures there, too, of regular looking students, holding up their creations. There was one photograph that held nothing but a picture of the award. Which was strange. The picture wasn’t even framed right. He looked closer and it looked like there was the faintest of outlines.

He heard a door open down the hallway, and Jughead knew he didn’t have any time left, so he knew he had to go, but as he stole one last look at the case, he saw it. He saw _her._

It was a reflection, cast upon the glass casing, and it was the face of a girl, wide eyed, jaw-dropped, like she was gasping.

Jughead was captivated by the certainty of this vision. Reflected though the image was on this darkly lit glass surface, it was clear enough to give him details. He could tell the color of her hair, her lips, and her sweater. He could see a ponytail.

He missed the color of her eyes, but he was _sure_ that she saw him seeing _her._ and then she was gone, shooting out of the frame of the glass. He glanced frantically behind him. Around him. There was no one but for the teacher coming from the other end of the hall.

“Are you lost, Mr. Jones?” asked Mr. Flutesnoot, the science professor.  

Distracted. Excited.

His heart was beating madly in his chest. He had seen her. He had seen a ghost.

_A ghost!_

“Mr. Jones.” The teacher’s tone had gone down an octave, displeasure seizing it.

“A little lost,” he replied, hoping to head off any trouble. “I was hoping there was another bathroom. With more privacy. I mean, I really need to--you know. I think I ate something bad…”

Understanding smoothened the lines on Professor Flutesnoot’s face. “Yes, well, the nurse’s bathroom might be best for that. Come with me.”

He supposed the embarrassment of using the nurse’s bathroom, which everyone knew was only used for “emergencies” was worth the secret. Besides, it probably would have gone poorly if he had told the professor the truth, that he had hoped to catch a spirit.  

_The spirit of lost girl._

 

********************

 

It was an intelligent haunt.

It had to be.

She had seen him seeing her and she had run away, frightened.

That was a little off-putting. What was she so afraid about? She was the ghost. He was just a guy. He didn’t even have his serpent jacket on at the time.

Nevertheless, he went back to that case again, and of course this time, absolutely nothing happened. He took photographs of the case, and zooming in on the academic awards.

He couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that seeing that strange photo in the case and _then_ seeing the ghost had some kind of connection.

The photo was extremely odd. That much was true, and the image’s eerie properties caught his fancy.  There _was_ some kind of faded outline of something, or someone, and while he knew pictures faded, ones behind glass cases took a little longer to fade. And if he went by the mostly illegible engraving on the award’s plaque--almost impossible to discern through the low resolution of the photo and through two layers of glass--he could estimate that the photograph was at least taken in the last decade.

He could make out the words “gative” and “Journa” on some of the lettering. He could only guess it had to do with some kind of investigative journalism award. He could see “201-” on the year, which meant it was a fairly recent award. If it was in the Riverdale High trophy case, then it was logical to suppose the award was given to the school paper, or someone on it.

The defunct Blue & Gold hadn’t run for months, he discovered. Not that anyone else was asking about it. Students expressed some regret that it wasn’t putting out new issues, but no one seemed to care that much, or else someone else might have taken the initiative to bring it back to life.

When he asked about the writers and editors on staff, no one could give him a name, and when he rifled through the abandoned office for old issues, all he found were batches of issues with no attribution.

Jughead was getting slightly angry. Who wrote a paper without attribution?

It didn’t make any sense.

He hurried back to the library, hauling the yearbooks onto a table.

As he flipped through the yearbook pages, he saw very little mention of the Blue & Gold, and even less on its staff. From what little he could infer, there was _one_ person running the entire operation, but no name was attached to it.

Towards the end of each yearbook were the sponsor pages, and he flipped through those haphazardly, but amidst the local businesses and the occasional fancy family photos, he spied a familiar block of letters, a logo with a distinct font.

“The Riverdale Register”

He had seen that same logo on the back of the Blue & Gold issues, distinct enough for him to remember.  The Riverdale Registered sponsored the Blue & Gold’s printing, so if anyone would know who ran the school paper, it would be the staff at the town paper.

He put away the yearbooks and practically sprinted out of the library. He unlocked the chain from his bike, wheeling it off the bike rack.

It was a ten-speed bike--not a motorcycle. His father’s motorcycle stayed mostly parked in their paltry front yard, covered in its protective tarp. Using it regularly would require gas he couldn’t afford. He only used the motorcycle when he had to go further than three miles and there wasn’t affordable public transportation that could get him there.  

He sped through traffic, pedaling frantically to get to his destination. He heard the angry honk of a vehicle a couple of times, but he knew that unless they ran him over, he was relatively safe on his side of the road.

When he arrived at the Register, it was open. The glass front made the inside of the office completely visible and he could see a couple of staff at their desks, one typing on his computer and another on the phone.

He set his bike along the brick wall of the facade and walked through the doors.

The staff, two elderly men, looked up from their work at his entry.  They exchanged startled looks with one another--like _really_ startled, before reverting their attention back to him.  It was seldom, perhaps, that a kid like him graced their office.  

Jughead saw name plates atop their desks. The gentleman with the tweed suit, turban, and white beard was designated at “Soonpoon”. The other, a large man with sharp features and a surly expression, was “McGinty”.

“Afternoon,” Jughead said, nodding at both gentlemen and tying to keep his voice certain and strong. He’d been turning over in his head how he was going to ask the questions he had.  It was difficult to feel like he actually had a reason for doing this--whatever they were, they were deeply personal and perhaps had no real-world value. But this quest for answers meant something to him, somehow.  

Neither one of them said anything. They just stared at him in surprise.

“H-He speaks,” Soonpoon gasped. “Did you hear him speak?”

McGinty shot him a glare. “I did.”

Jughead wasn’t sure why they sounded so perplexed. Had they expected him to just stand there? But he reminded himself that he was on a mission, and so he cleared his throat.

 _Here goes nothing._ “I just transferred from the Southside school to Riverdale high and I’m looking to revive the school paper there--the Blue & Gold? I noticed from the old issues that the Riverdale Register sponsored its printing in the past. Would you somehow be interested in taking up that sponsorship again?”

Soonpoon exchanged glances with his partner. “What do I do?”

“Just act natural,” McGinty replied through grit teeth.

“There is _nothing_ natural about this.”

“You know we talked about how this could happen by using _this_ space.”

“Yes, but not to _us!”_

“Just go with what it says and we’ll deal with it later!”

These men were really odd and Jughead was beginning to feel annoyed. He was about to tell them that he could hear them talking about him when Soonpoon leveled his expression and said, “Sponsorship, you say? I suppose, so. If it did so in the past…”

Jughead thought that a strange response. “You--uh, didn’t know that?”

McGinty scowled.

Soonpoon nodded. “Todd and I--um, partnered to buy this paper after its previous owners left--just up and left town as soon as they settled their account with us. Don’t know that they sponsored anything, but I suppose if they did....”

“Jim,” said Todd, gruffly.

“Well, you don’t _have_ to,” Jughead muttered, awkwardly. Clearly, Todd was not happy about sponsoring anything. “But it _would_ be great if you could do that… um, listen, I’m also trying to find the former editor of the Blue & Gold--you know, so I can get tips on how she--or he--ran it. I mean, honestly, I couldn’t seem to get a name, but I figured, since your paper sponsored the printing, you had to have _some_ record on who it was that requested the sponsorship, right?”

Todd eyed him, almost with contempt.

“Todd, you can probably get that information _in the back_ ,” Jim said. “The former owners kept every receipt and invoice--didn’t bring a thing when they left, so it’s probably still there.  God knows, we ought to be grateful this young man over here has an appreciation for the printed periodical.”

Jughead, with his frozen smile, turned back to Todd for a response.

His scowl had grown deeper. “No, Soonpoon.”

Soonpoon’s eyebrow arched. “Then how do you propose,” he asked in a mild voice that inexplicably made the hairs on the back of Jughead’s neck rise. “--we deal with him?”

Todd took a deep breath. “No need to go to the back, young man. I know who it is.”

Soonpoon gave a huff, but Jughead was too eager to give his odd, _sudden_ dissent much thought.

“Oh, it would be really helpful if you can just give me a name.”

Todd paused, arching his eyebrow at Jim.  Jim waved his hand in obvious resignation and perhaps that was some kind of permission, because it was only after that Todd said, “Her name is Betty Cooper.”

 

**************

 

Betty Cooper.

Now that he looked closer at the photograph in the trophy case, he could discern a CO and a P in the plaque. The name before it looked longer, but it was still very hard to tell. It hardly mattered. In his mind, he was growing convinced that the missing editor and the ghost were one and the same.  

But what happened to her? And why does no one remember her? If she were gone from the school long enough, it was entirely possible that her memory would fade from the graduating student body, but the faculty, as well?

He could only suppose that an award winning junior journalist would at least be remembered by the principal or the english teacher, but a quick conversation with both proved that neither could recall her name.

Soonpoon and McGinty certainly remembered her, so she wasn’t a figment of his imagination, but when he went back to gather more information from them, the office that looked like a legitimate business only days before looked nothing more than an abandoned office space--like nothing had been there for months. The inside looked stacked with junk, the door looked boarded up, and it was dark and moldy.

Jughead stood there for a full ten minutes, questioning his sanity.

When he finally broke out of his extremely troubled thoughts, he grew determined.

There were other ways to find answers. He knew the answers were within reach.

Betty Cooper certainly lived in Riverdale and she had to have had parents, or guardians, at least. She couldn’t have existed by herself, right?

He went to City Hall to visit the registrar, hoping he could dig through records on his own. It turned out that unless you had a very specific reason to request records, you spoke to _one_ person through a window.

The tag on the woman’s shirt said “Julia Muggs”. He knew that last name. There was a girl in his class whom the teacher called Muggs, and whom he had heard others call Ethel. She kept bumping into him in the hallway. His sullen stare did nothing to discourage her from giving him a shy wave and eyeing the book he carried around with him. He had a feeling she was just waiting for the moment he carried one she had previously read.

Swallowing his anti-social tendencies, he forced a smile on his lips and said, “Muggs? Any relation to Ethel?”

Julia seemed unimpressed. “My daughter. You go to school with her?”

Jughead nodded, enthusiastically. “She’s nice. Makes me feel welcome in school.”

Julia arched an eyebrow. “Oh, you’re one of those Southside kids. What’s your name?”

“Jughead Jones, ma’am.”

Julia paused. “Jughead, you said?”

“Yes, ma’am. And I was hoping you could help me with something. There’s an office space in town--along JFK boulevard. My… boss has been looking for a space to rent in town for their… business dealings, and I just want to make an impression with him—wanted inquire about the owner of that empty space. There wasn’t a For Rent sign or anything, but it’s just sitting there, and maybe they could be persuaded to make an income in rent for a good price.”

Julia gave him a severely unimpressed stare and Jughead could feel his own face flaming. After several seconds, she said, “Enterprising, aren’t you?”

He cleared his throat. “I try.”

“Give me a moment.”  Julia began to type on her computer. After a minute, she said, “Address?”

Jughead gave her the information.

After several minutes, Julia eyed the screen more closely. “That property is owned by… Harold and Alice Cooper. No contact number, but I have a home address...”

This was an interesting development. Soonpoon and McGinty didn’t tell him the _Coopers_ owned the Register. They said they bought the business from the previous owners. Could’ve been a lie. Could’ve been that they bought the business but not the property.

“It’d be great if I can get that address!”

Julia arched an eyebrow. “I can’t give you that information.”

His heart sank. “Oh.”

“But,” Julia continued. “There’s a homecoming dance coming up and I know that Ethel’s been wanting to go… that of interest to you? The school dance?”

Jughead pursed his lips, hearing Julia loud and clear. “Totally. Do you know if Ethel has a date yet?”

“I don’t think so. Listen, I need some coffee out back. Would you like some coffee, yourself? I can get you some. It’s free.”

“No, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

 _“I said_ , would you like some coffee? Totally won’t cost you a cent.”

It took a moment for Jughead to process that question. _Don’t be an idiot._  “Uhhh, yeah! Coffee would be great!”

“Okay. I’ll just be a few minutes.” She left, and as soon as she disappeared around the corner, Jughead reached through the small window and turned her computer screen so he could read what was on it.

The Coopers’ house was on Elm Street, and as he scrolled down to find out more information, it said the couple had three children, two alive, one deceased.

This was more than enough information, but he took out his phone and snapped as many photos of the monitor as he could, scrolling down the computer screen as far and as fast as that tiny window would allow.

Soon enough, he heard movement coming from the back and Jughead righted the monitor, awkwardly settling back to pretend everything was perfectly normal.

_Just a guy waiting at the registrar’s window._

“We ran out of cups,” Julia said, shrugging. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine.”

“Will that be all, then?”

“Yeah, that’s all, I guess that’s another dead end,” Jughead said casually. Not that Julia didn’t know. Obviously, she had let him spy on her computer, with the promise of him asking her daughter to the dance. He could simply ignore that deal, he knew, but his conscience would probably make him do it, anyway.  

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you,” said Julia in an exaggerated regretful tone.

“Yeah. Well, I’ll just keep looking for spaces to lease. I mean, there are a lot of them with actual contact info posted on their windows.”

“Right.”

“Thanks anyway, Ms. Muggs. Say hello to Ethel for me.”

“You say hello to Ethel for me.”

Jughead pressed his lips together and wagged a finger. “Got it.”

“You better.”

 

***********************

 

He looked up at the house on Elm, with its overgrown hedges, dark windows, greening siding, and the fading red door.

He could imagine that lived in, this house was beyond charming. The house itself was elevated, sitting atop a mound. The front door sat at the top of a stone stairway, accented by brick and framed by intricate iron railings. On both sides of the railing would have been landscaped patches of sloped lawn leading up to the house’s facade. He could see how the trees on both sides of the lawn would’ve added to the charm—the symmetry, but now they were just overgrown and heavy with untrimmed leaves.

As Jughead pushed himself up the walkway, the shadow of the trees seemed to darken the mood, and the closer he got to the door, the rot and ruin on the house grew sharper in his mind’s eye. He could see the moss decay between the seems, saw how the dust and dirt made filthy trails along any exterior surfaces. He could see ivy and piles of rotting leaves.

As he reached the top landing, he looked to the left and right windows. There was no movement in the house. Why would there be?

He reached for the handle of the door, expecting it to be locked, but the plunger sank through and before he could think on it, he was pushing the door in.

 

********************

 

He could see the dust floating through the air, cutting through what little sunbeams slanted through the windows.

Sheets had been draped over what furniture remained giving a gothic feel to what otherwise would’ve been a Colonial.

The cold trapped within its walls seeped into his bones and as he tried to envision the house with people in it, he realized that the house was a ghost of itself.

He followed his urge to climb the stairs. The carpeting on the stairs were thick with dust, but he can still feels its softness beneath his shoes. It was dark in the throughway, but he could see some sunlight streaming from above.

There was a window at the landing, and one of doors along the wrapping hallway was ajar. Bright light shone through the crack.

He went to it, drawn by the light, and as he pushed the door open, he saw more sheets, but the window shutters were wide open.

There was a window seat, and by the shape of the sheets, there was a bed, a dressing table, and what he could only assume was a standing mirror.

Even amidst the dusk, he could see the pink on the walls and the beige of the carpet.

Impulsively, he opened the cabinets along the walls, pushing the folding panels back.

There were clothes still hung on the rack. Flowery dresses, denim jumpers, intricate sweaters, silk blouses, and piles of folded pastel shirts.

This was her room. It had to be.

He thought he saw a shadow move and his eyes darted to the movement.

There was a bird by the window, fluffing its feathers as it roosted in a branch, and its shadow danced against the wall. As he stared out of the windows, it occurred to him that the light in the room was too bright. Too much.

Hurriedly, he closed the shutters and immediately, the room was engulfed in shadow.

There was still sunlight filtering through the slats, but the mood in the room immediately shifted, and he stood still, _waiting_ for something to happen.

A shadow shifted and his gaze followed its movement. His heart drummed in his chest.  

“Hello?” he called out.

The shadow paused.

Licking his lips, he decided to go for it. “Betty Cooper? I know it’s you. If you can hear me, I want you to know that you have nothing to be afraid of. I just want to know what happened to you.”

He didn’t get an audible response, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move again.

Determination pushed him forward. Quickly, he went to the dresser and whipped off its sheet, certain that he would catch something on the mirror’s surface.

There was a movement along the mirror’s frame. Like the fading whip of a blonde ponytail.

Fevered now, Jughead hurried to the standing mirror at the other side of the room and whipped the sheet off it.

Primal fear leapt into his chest when he saw the full bodied form of her phantom, standing by the door. Her wide eyed expression was one of panic, and then fury.

She surged towards him, and in spite of wanting to catch sight of her, he emitted a startled yelp, his gaze whipping over his shoulder. Of course he saw nothing there, but when he looked back at the mirror, it was swinging lightly on its hinges and she was gone.

He looked around the room. He was shaking. His breathing was loud and deep, but as his nerves began to settle and his senses began to return, a smirk began to form on his lips.

“Gotcha.”


	2. The Ghost in You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Needless to say, this story wasn't supposed to take this long, but now that my other story is completed for now, I can get to this! And I'll be sticking to this for the time being. 
> 
> Hope you like this next installment!

 

She was blonde.

Very blonde.

And she wasn’t dressed in a spooky white flowing dress. She was in a shirt and what Jughead couldn’t help but describe as rather skimpy shorts. It was almost like she was going to bed, except she still had that really tight ponytail.

It was kind of blowing his mind that ghosts can change clothes in the undead realm, unless those were the clothes she died in, in which case he felt even sorrier for her, because it was bad enough that you were unexpectedly dead, but to be stuck in clothing like that for eternity? That would be Jughead’s own personal hell--to be in so little clothing and be unable to do anything about it.

That aside, he was somewhat thrilled to confirm that this haunt was intelligent and that possibly, he could communicate with her.  

He had _so many_ questions.

He just hoped she would be willing to communicate.

There wasn’t anything to suggest that they could _actually_ talk. All those ghost hunting shows use flashlights and “spirit” boxes and “oviluses”. And even if he could afford the flashlights, he didn’t want to be stuck with asking yes and no questions.  

There had to be another way, and research suggested that he could either conduct a seance or use a ouija board. Of course, he had to ignore all of the horror stories associated with using such implements, and really, all he had to tell himself was that his ghost--Betty’s ghost, had so far deviated from all documented and described apparitions.

A seance, while not requiring any expensive equipment or materials, required more than one person and preferably a medium. Since he’d probably get beat up if he asked any of the Serpents to help him with this and he didn’t know any mediums who would do this for free, he had no other option except to use a ouija board.

He could probably find some candles at the dollar store, and the board itself wasn’t that expensive, ready made, but he could make one of his own with some paper and an upside down glass or a wooden planchette.

His next problem was the timing. He needed to do this at night and it had to be when nobody expected him to be home. While logically, nobody really cared if he was in bed by 9, his uncle would take any excuse to make his life even more miserable, and he didn’t feel like crashing in the abandoned drive in again when his uncle kicked him out of the trailer.  

The dance was a couple of days away and that was a likely excuse to be out later than usual.

He was yet to ask Ethel Muggs to this dance. He didn’t want to and he already got what he wanted from the registrar, so he just had to avoid Ethel in school and hope that dance would come and go without him having to deal with any of it, so it was kind of a shock when his Uncle Souphead told him at dinner that Jughead can use the truck to pick up Ethel for the dance.

Jughead almost choked on his grocery store fried chicken. “What?”

“Saw Julia Muggs at the registrar this afternoon--had to ask an extension on the property taxes for this trailer. Basically said that you and Ethel need a ride to the dance and if I obliged, she’d give me the extension.”

Jughead stared at his uncle in mild horror. “I haven’t asked Ethel to the dance.”

“Well, boy, you better get to it, or I’ll throw your shit out of my trailer and don’t bother coming back.”

Suddenly, his feelings for Ethel went from mild avoidance to a simmering hate.

He had to tell himself that it wasn’t Ethel’s fault that her mother was a total hustler. He wondered, spitefully, at what Ethel would have to say when she learned that he was only asking her to this dance because her mother coerced him to do it.

**************

He couldn’t bring himself to be such a jerk.

When he walked up to Ethel Muggs the next day, ready to spit out, “Let’s just get this over with and go to the dance. Tell your mom thanks for making me choose between taking her daughter out or being homeless,” his anger waned at the startled expression on her face, the look of panic, and the reddening of her cheeks.  

“H-Hi, Jughead,” she said. She looked ready to bolt at the slightest sign of cruelty--because that would’ve described what he had almost inflicted upon her. And the truth was, if people had just been a little kinder to him, so much of his life would’ve been easier.

He couldn’t help but feel that sense of solidarity with her at that moment.

He gave a soft, resigned sigh. He looked around briefly to make sure nobody was overhearing them, before he said, “Hi Ethel. How’s it going?”

“G-Good. You?”

“Spectacular.” He pursed his lips. He wished that sometimes, sarcasm didn’t come so easily for him. “Listen, I have something I wanna ask you.”

She still looked like she would take off in a run. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Are you… going to the dance with anyone?”

Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened, and he wanted to tell her that _jeez, is it that shocking?_ but it occurred to him that maybe she didn’t _want_ to go with someone like him--one of the Southside kids, and that by asking her, he might be _scaring_ her into doing it.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” he added hastily. “I mean, dances are--” _stupid._

“Oh, my God,” Ethel whispered. “How did she do it? How did she make you ask me?”

Heat crept up his face. _Jesus Christ._ He hadn’t expected to be called out on his motives. “Listen, it doesn’t matter how your mom made me do it, what matters is that I’m here and I’m asking.” It also occurred to him that if Ethel didn’t agree to go with him, he might get kicked out of the trailer, anyway.

Ethel looked about ready to cry. “Mom means well, but it’s _really_ humiliating when I find out that almost every date I’ve had was because mom strong-armed someone at the registrar’s office so they can get their sons to ask me out.”

“But--”

She pushed past him and Jughead watched, helplessly, as his prospects of shelter waned and the weight of his guilt began to crush him.

Desperately, he went after her, “Ethel wait, please don’t--”

“I don’t need your pity-date, Jones. Just leave me alone, okay--”

“It’s not a pity date. If you don’t go to the dance with me--”

“What? You don’t get the filing extension? You get charged interest? You get that safety violation?”

“I’ll be homeless. My uncle will kick me out of his trailer.” His stomach dropped. _Now_ he felt like she was giving him the pity date. It was awful enough to make him want to vomit.

Ethel’s eyes widened, her jaw dropping. “Oh.”

He swallowed his gorge. “Listen, forget I said that. What if we _don’t_ go to the dance? What if we pretend to go to the dance together but we sneak out and do something else?”

Her eyes widened again, then a fierce blush began to bloom on her cheeks. She stepped closer and said in a lowered voice, “Jughead, I’m _not_ that kind of girl.”

“What?” he squeaked. “What are you--whatever it is you’re thinking, that’s not what I meant!”

She scowled. “Well, then what _do_ you mean?”

He sighed and urged her to follow him into the Blue & Gold.

Ethel paused, not moving from her spot.

Jughead tried the last shot in his locker. He flashed a smirk. “Aren’t you _a little_ curious?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

He ushered her into the office, and no sooner had he shut the door behind him, he said, “I think there’s a ghost in Riverdale High and I’m going to try to communicate with it. I was hoping I can do it the night of the dance.”

The shock on Ethel’s face transformed into a scowl. “If this is some sick prank—“

“It’s not a prank!” Jughead said, quickly. “Look, I’ve made a ouija board and I’m probably going to use a shot glass to roll over the letters and stuff--”

“Oh, my God, you’re serious. You’re really serious.”

“I’ve seen her. I’ve seen the ghost and I think I know who she is. Her name is Betty Cooper and something happened to her. I just don’t know what.”

Ethel blinked in surprise. “Did you say Betty Cooper?”

Hope inexplicably bloomed in his chest. Ethel’s tone was one of recognition. She was the only one outside of Soonpoon and McGinty who ever spoke of Betty’s name with that tone. “You knew her?”

Ethel looked troubled. “S-sort of. She didn’t seem to like calling attention to herself, but she seemed... really nice.”

His chest was buzzing. “So you _saw_ her. She was real.”

Ethel frowned. “Of course she was.”

He hastened to explain. “Sorry. It’s just that no one seems to remember her. I’ve asked around, even at the admin office, and they had no idea—“

“She stood up for me,” Ethel said, her face going deeply red. “Once, in the locker rooms. Bunch of cheerleaders kept making fun of how tall I was. Made me feel like a freak.”

Jughead’s stomach dropped and his lips clamped tight for a heartbeat. He didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound lame or patronizing.

He got his ass kicked every so often, sure, but that was gang stuff. They weren’t making fun of who he was.

Besides, he was guilty himself of calling her Big Ethel. Not to make fun of her, honestly. He just assumed that was her nickname, because she _was_ tall. Almost as tall as his 6”1’. He supposed he should’ve known that their classmates used it to make fun of her.

“Everyone laughed except for her,” Ethel continued. “It was the first time I’d ever heard her speak. I think it was the first time for all of us. She told Gloria Granbilt to shut the hell up. Can you imagine?”

Gloria Granbilt was head cheerleader, HBIC, and the leading cause of high school misery in Riverdale High. Nobody had the balls to stand up to her because she was rich, beautiful, and allegedly, murderously stone cold.

_I heard she pushed a rival off a cliff at summer camp. The other girl lived, but she’s paralyzed from the waist, down._

Rumors, of course, but she seemed like she could do it.

“What did Gloria think of that?” Jughead was genuinely curious. Anyone who can stand up to Granbilt deserved respect in his book.

“I think Gloria just didn’t know what to do at first. Nobody ever dared before. Betty told her she was a vindictive spoiled brat who used money and hate to fill the nightmare void in her heart.”

“Kinda surprised Gloria didn’t stab her dead right there.”

Ethel chuckled. “Me, too. I was terrified for us both, but Betty then asked her how last summer went and Gloria backed off before it got more scandalous in the locker rooms.”

Jughead was intrigued. He liked a good blackmail plot. “Did Betty ever tell you what that meant?”

She shook her head. “I asked. I followed Betty out of the lockers to thank her and ask her, but Betty was dodgy. She just said she has stuff on Gloria that could ruin her college plans. That was the last time I talked to Betty. Two weeks later, she disappeared. I still think Gloria killed her. I’m mad that nobody seems to care.”

Jughead wondered about that a lot. Why did everyone seem to forget about Betty? Why the collective fog? And why would Ethel remember her and nobody else did?

“So what do you say, Muggs? Want to help me contact her spirit and ask her a bunch of questions?”

Ethel paused, giving Jughead a pointed stare. “You really believe in this stuff?”

“I _saw_ her. With my own eyes. And if she _had_ been murdered, I want to know who did it and I want to put them away.”

After another few seconds of silence, Ethel finally nodded. “Me, too. What the hell, right?”

 

********************

 

Picking up Ethel from her house was an intensely awkward affair. First of all, he didn’t have a corsage. He couldn’t afford one, but perhaps anticipating that, Julia Muggs slipped him a plastic container with a corsage in it while her daughter wasn’t looking.

When Ethel arrived in the living room, Jughead truthfully told her she looked pretty, because she did. It was a simple blue dress that flattered her reed-like frame, her short hair slicked back in a stylish sweep.

She blushed at his compliments, which Jughead thought a bit silly. It was just _him._

Julia Muggs took their picture and them sent them off with a wave.

“So, ready to contact a spirit?” Jughead asked as he drove, first in one direction for Julia’s benefit, then as they drove out of sight, he began to turn in the direction of Betty’s house.

Ethel fidgeted in her seat. “Um, yeah. Sure.”

Jughead felt it--that slight hint of surprise from her. _Dear God._ He just realized something. “Did you… want to… go to the dance, first?”

That was harder to get out than he thought.

Her eyes lit. “I mean, we’re all dressed up.”

His heart sank. He couldn’t stay out so late that they could go both to the dance and Elm street, but the fact was, Ethel was doing him a favor. “I suppose we can go for thirty minutes…”

“Yes! Thirty minutes, tops!”

The hollow thud in his stomach was palpable, but he drove in the direction of Riverdale High, hoping that the 30 minutes would fly by.

They didn’t, quite.

When Jughead and Ethel arrived at Riverdale High, many of the Serpent kids were hanging out in the parking lot on their motorcycles, some of them brashly smoking cigarettes and drinking from slushie cups. He could hear the laughter and hoots following him even while Ethel chattered on about something or other. It was already worse than he thought.

At the dance, Ethel met up with her friends with squeals and giggles, and Jughead tried to melt between the shadows of light. He found himself looking into dark reflective surfaces. Maybe Betty Cooper was watching the festivities from her shaded plane.

He managed to hang back, dodging Ethel’s attempts to get him onto the dance floor. He felt a little mean telling her “This really isn’t my thing,” knowing that she would remember how her mother had schemed him into taking her to the dance, but he quieted his guilt by thinking that he had walked through the doors with her, and that everyone saw them arrive together.

Jughead kept checking the time, formulating the words for when he told Ethel that their thirty minutes were up. He contemplated asking one of Ethel’s friends to take her home for him--perhaps then he could just slip out and do his own thing while Ethel stayed to enjoy the dance, but even _he_ knew that was a dick move.

He stewed on his predicament as 30 minutes ticked away to 40, and then 45.

He was dying, but when Ethel caught his eye, he looked at her hopefully, and the mirth melted from her face.

Ethel came up to him, finally, and said, “I went over 30 minutes, didn’t I?”

Jughead shrugged, shoving his hands in the pockets of his pants. “A little. Listen, if you wanna stay--”

“I do!”

“--I have to go.”

He hated himself, but he never wanted to be in this dance in the first place.

She sighed and nodded. “Let’s go. I wasn’t even supposed to have a date, so…”

“Sorry. I just--”

“It’s okay, Jughead. It was nice of you to bring me here--I mean, I know you would’ve been home--”

“Don’t ever say that out loud again.”

Her face reddened. “Sorry. I mean, yeah, I’m still grateful you brought me, so I should do you the courtesy of helping you with your spirit quest.”

It sounded like the most bonkers thing and Jughead had to ask himself how he had gotten himself in this situation in the first place--wanting to communicate with a dead girl and rejecting the norms of high school.

Before he could think more on it, he led the way out of the school, with Ethel trailing behind him.

The Serpents watching them get into the truck hooted even louder, shouting lewd comments that made him want to disappear. The second Ethel shut her door, he pulled out of the parking lot and headed straight for Elm.

 

************************

 

The house was _much_ creepier at night. As he and Ethel stood at the bottom of the front steps, the house really looked haunted, and Ethel could not help but grab his arm.

He heard her swallow.

“Jughead, you really know how to show a girl a good time.”

He should be embarrassed, but he was too freaked out to think of it as anything more than the ramblings of someone justifiably nervous.

“Yeah, sorry I’m weird,” he muttered, distractedly. He climbed the steps and felt Ethel’s resistance. He was determined to do this, but Ethel was under no obligation to anyone to do the same. “Ethel, you don’t have to do this with me. I mean, I don’t think anything bad will happen, but I understand if--”

Ethel’s lips tightened to a line.  “I’m not a coward.”

“I know you’re not--”

“So let’s get on with this.”

_Okay, then._

He led them up the steps and at the landing, he turned the door handle and pushed it open. Like before, it was unlocked, and when he walked across the threshold, he realized the house was so much worse at night. He dug into his backpack for his flashlight and swept its light around.  

Everything was where he last left it, as it should’ve been, but there was such a thing as vagrants, and the last thing he wanted was to get caught off-guard, or harmed, by a living person.

The door shut behind him and he jumped slightly, only realizing that it was Ethel when he swerved the light to the door. She opened and closed the door again, as if to check that they hadn’t gotten locked in.  The hinges creaked each time.

He took a deep breath. He really shouldn’t be freaked out by the natural ambience. It was just mood lighting and he should be more afraid of wildlife than anything else.  

He took to the stairs, Ethel following behind him. At the top of the landing, he directed the flashlight down the hallway.

“This way,” he said, feeling a bit more comfortable. They were headed to Betty’s room now, and he was inexplicably feeling like this was ridiculous, that after all this fuss, nothing was going to happen.  

When they entered Betty’s room, Ethel gave a slight whistle. “Everything’s still here, isn’t it? Like they just up and left everything.”

Jughead nodded, kneeling on the floor and setting his bag down.  “Yeah. I don’t know what happened, but hopefully, we can communicate with Betty and find out.”

“Everything’s so _pink.”_

“And?” It leapt out of him before he could stop it, and he realized that he sounded defensive, like he took personal offense at the comment on Betty’s behalf.  Let the lady have her pink things. It doesn’t make or diminish her. It shouldn’t.

“Nothing. It’s just weirdly overwhelming.” Ethel came down to her knees and watched him unfold the makeshift ouija board he had.  He brought out the crystal glass Ethel had given him to use and spread out the candles.

As he lit the wicks, he realized that the full-length mirror behind Ethel seemed oddly dark, like its reflection was muted. It could just be the lighting.

When the glow of the candles spread, he shut off his flashlight and moved the inverted glass onto the center of the board.

“Okay,” he began. He didn’t know if he knew what he was doing, but who, really, knew how to do this?  “My research said we should both put our fingers on the glass, and then I should try to start communicating.”

“Shouldn’t we say--I don’t know, a prayer, first?”

Jughead arched an eyebrow. “Like, what kind of prayer?”

Ethel shrugged. “Hail Mary?”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“Well, something from whatever religion you practice.”

Jughead gave it a brief thought before digging into his backpack. He pulled out a copy of _Farenheit 451_ and turned it to a page he had marked. It was a passage in the book that had struck his fancy, and really, literature was as close to having a religion as he was going to get. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

He smiled, satisfied, and looked at Ethel unexpectedly. She seemed woefully unimpressed, even as she tried to say, in an upbeat tone, “That’ll have to do.”

With what he considered a prayer done, he set his book aside and placed his fingers on the glass.

Ethel did the same, and with their hands in place, Jughead took a deep breath and spoke the words that the online spiritualist blogs said he should speak.

“We respectfully summon the spirit of Betty Cooper.”

Honestly, Jughead felt slightly insane saying these words out loud, but he had committed to this and he was going to do this with as little cynicism as possible. After all, he had _seen her_. With his own eyes. If he was going crazy, he may as well go with it.

“Betty Cooper, if you’re with us, please make your presence known.”

They held so still that he could hear Ethel’s breathing.

“Betty Cooper?” Ethel said. “It’s me, Ethel. Do you remember me? You stood up to Gloria Granbilt for me that one time in the locker room.”

Jughead gave Ethel a nod of gratitude.

They waited in silence.

A couple of minutes went by before they heard a creak and Ethel jumped. Jughead’s own heart leaped to his throat.

“What was that?” Ethel hissed.

Jughead swallowed. “It’s just the house settling. Give it another minute.”

“Betty? Is that you?” Ethel asked, her eyes darting from side to side.

Jughead couldn’t resist looking around them, as well, but they kept their fingers poised on the glass.

The glass moved and Ethel gave a squeak. “Oh, my God, it’s moving!”

 _“Don’t_ take your hand off the glass!” Jughead cried. _“Don’t--”_

A movement caught Jughead’s eye and his gaze swerved to the mirror behind Ethel. The dark film on the mirror rippled and slowly, like a sheet being move aside, the mirror’s surface cleared, and there he saw an apparition--shiny blonde hair, bright green eyes, an eyebrow arching in what looked like a mildly unsurprised tilt.  

Jughead could barely form the words as he stared at her--at Betty Cooper.  

Ethel looked terrified as she stared up at Jughead’s face. He never removed his gaze from the mirror behind her as he nodded slowly in the mirror’s direction.

Slowly, without removing her hands from the glass, she craned her neck to look over her shoulder.

She stared, her jaw dropping, then she looked back at Jughead, wide eyed and slack jawed.

“There’s nothing there.”

 

***************************

 

That caught Jughead off guard. His eyes darted momentarily to Ethel, her startled look of confusion throwing off his own certainty that Betty was _right there._ He looked at the mirror again. Betty hadn’t faded in the least, still with her eyebrow arched, as if waiting for what he had to say.

“B-But--”

“I don’t see anything, Jughead,” Ethel whispered.

He could _see_ Betty, and now Betty was shaking her head.

Jughead didn’t know what to say.  

Ethel gave him an apologetic look. “Are you--are you sure you didn’t take any of the Jangle Jingle floating around at the dance?”

“W-What? No! I didn’t--” He gasped when he saw her remove her hands from the glass. _“Ethel!”_

Jughead looked frantically back at the mirror, afraid that they would lose their connection to the spirit world, but Betty was still there and she was _shrugging._

“She can’t see me, Jughead.”

Jughead fell back in surprise, his own fingers tearing away from the glass on the ouija board. He pointed at the mirror. “She just _said_ something, Ethel! Didn’t you hear?”

Ethel shook her head, a concerned look settling on her face.

“She can’t hear me, either,” Betty added.

Her voice was shockingly normal. Lovely, but normal, and he couldn’t seem to reconcile what he was seeing and hearing with what Ethel was telling him. The disconnect was blowing his mind, and he sat there, struggling to make sense of it all.

“You might have inhaled some of the powder and it’s latently affecting you,” Ethel suggested, gently.

Jughead scowled, shooting her a glare. It was completely possible that he was seeing things, but it was hard to believe that his imaginings of an apparition would be of an attractive young woman who apparently wore perfectly applied makeup, a beige sweater with flowers along its collar, skinny jeans, and knitted socks. He didn’t even know people wore sweaters like that.

If he were going insane and this was a figment of his delusions, this spirit would be floating above the ground, hair rippling around her head, eyes glowing, definitely a white flowing robe, and possibly speaking in an unearthly, hollowed voice.

That Betty Cooper was at the moment crossing her arms over her chest and waiting for him to react to this situation was, in fact, starting to ground him in reality.

If he didn’t start acting logically now, Ethel might become a problem.

He wrestled with himself to speak reason. “Y-You’re probably right.”

“Good answer,” Betty said.

He squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself to focus. When he opened them and Betty was still there, he felt slightly more confident that Betty wasn’t going away anytime soon. “So this session was unsuccessful, I think. I’ve clearly been tainted by hallucinogens.”

Ethel sighed, and nodded. “Clearly. Do you still see her?”

“She’s fading.” The lie slipped out of him easily enough.

“Good. At least we know it’s wearing off.”

“Give me a sec.” He pretended to look a little winded and he must have done a good job because she rushed to his side to sit him on the edge of the bed.

A puff of dust rose up around them and they coughed for a few seconds, waving their hands about to clear the air.

When the dust settled, he eyed the mirror again and saw that Betty seemed impressed by his theatrics.

“You okay, Jughead?” Ethel asked, carefully.

After a second’s pause, he nodded. “Yeah, I think I am. I’m good. Um, thanks for asking.”

“What are you going to do now?” She was making this face, one where she is obviously being careful about her words, lest he snap, perhaps, and do something stupid.

He chose his words, too. “Continue my research. Something still happened to Betty Cooper and I want to find out what.” He began to blow out the candles and the room was bathed in darkness once more.  Betty wasn’t fading and when he flipped on his flashlight, she remained on the glass, watching him with apparent curiosity.

He put aside his ouija board and gave back Ethel her crystal glass, then he picked up his candles, waiting for them to cool a bit more before putting them back in his pack.  

“I guess I’ll drive you home.”

Ethel tilted a smile. “Not sure if you should be driving, though.”

He took a deep breath. “I think I’m fine. It’s just a few blocks from here.  We got here okay, didn’t we?”

“I guess. Let’s get out of here. Ghost or no ghost, this place gives me the creeps.”

“Think, uh, you can give me a minute?”

Ethel frowned. “You want me to wait out there in the creepy hallway all by myself?”

“I won’t make you wait long! Here. Take this flashlight.”

Ethel rolled her eyes and grabbed the flashlight, grumbling, “Fine,” as she let herself out and left Jughead by himself.

He turned his gaze at the mirror, Betty’s visage clearly amused.  

“Am I losing my mind?” he whispered.

She shook her head. “You aren’t. Are you coming back?”

He couldn’t believe this was happening. He couldn’t believe he was having a casual conversation with a ghost. “I am.”

“Then, I’ll wait.” She tilted a smile. “I liked _Fahrenheit 451,_ too.”

Excitement rippled in his belly for the first time that night. He probably should have felt this way about walking up to Ethel’s front door, or when the strobe and beat of lights and music filled him as they walked into the gym. He should’ve been giddily partaking of the spiked punch, or perhaps even drunkenly high-fiving the gangbangers on the parking lot.  That’s what a normal high schooler would do.

But he was weird, and instead, he thrilled at speaking with the ghost of Betty Cooper.  

“I’ll bring back my copy.”

“No need.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “I have one of my own.”

He saw the book reflected on the glass, which prompted him to look over his shoulder at the shelve of books behind him, and there among the other tomes was _Fahrenheit 451._

A wisp of a thought filtered through his consciousness, odd but so ineffably right.

_Great taste in books._

For a ghost.

 


	3. Mirror, Mirror

 

As Jughead drove Ethel back to her house, he was absolutely distracted. He kept thinking of Betty Cooper, and how, other than the fact that she was a spectre on a mirror, she seemed so shockingly normal.

He had many questions, and he couldn’t wait to sit down with her and ask them.

Ethel tried to make casual conversation with him along the way, and he tried his best to be responsive, but his answers were stilted, with his mind going one way while Ethel’s words were trying to wrench it in another.

“Don’t feel so bad, Jug,” she finally said as they approached her house’s front curb. “I mean--maybe it’s for the best you’re not communing with the dead.”

Jughead cringed inwardly at the term. _The dead._ If there ever was a term so unfit for Betty Cooper, it was “dead”.   _Undead_ didn’t work, either.  There was absolutely nothing ghastly about her. She just seemed-- _not of this world._

But with Ethel unable to see or hear her, he couldn’t blame Ethel’s inability to understand where he was coming from.  “Yeah, it’s a little disappointing, but like I said, there’s still a lot to investigate on this case, even without the paranormal stuff.”

She tilted a smile. “That’s the spirit.”

“Haha.”

“Well, it was a really interesting night, Jones. Thanks for bringing me to the dance.”

He nodded. “And thanks for accompanying me to the creepy house to summon spirits.”

Ethel grinned and stepped out of the truck.

As Jughead got ready to drive off, Ethel leaned over the passenger window. “Hey, listen, Jug. Don’t be a stranger.”

He supposed he _could_ be a little more social.

_Or not._

“See you around, Ethel.”  

She waved and he drove off, eager to get back to Elm street.

He began to calculate the time he had left. On the one hand, his uncle may return home sober, long enough to make a big deal of Jughead being out too late and giving him a hard time the following day _before_ he got wasted, or Uncle Souphead may be completely drunk since 5 in the afternoon and Jughead could be out all night without his uncle knowing any better.

At any rate, his uncle gets the extension on the trailer so he wouldn’t throw Jughead out for being out.  He might tell Jughead to find his own dinner, which was a much easier predicament than being homeless.

As he got back to Elm, he looked up at the house again and realized that it suddenly wasn’t as scary as he first thought it was.  Taking his backpack with him and using his flashlight, he made his way back into the house more briskly.

All those ghost hunting shows online seem to think that haunted houses always had multiple ghosts, so in essence, he should be thinking of other strange spirits that may be wandering the house, but he seemed to have gotten it in his head that Betty managed to have this house all to herself.

As he entered Betty’s bedroom, he peered into the mirror and didn’t see her there. At the moment, it just looked like a mirror’s surface. “Hello?”

He felt slightly foolish for saying that. This mirror was not some cosmic telephone.

When nothing happened, he fell back to questioning his sanity. Perhaps Ethel was right. Perhaps he had inhaled something that was making him see things, or maybe he _was_ losing his mind.  

But the mirror’s surface began to ripple back to life, and slowly, Betty reappeared on the glass, an amused glint in her eyes. “You’re back.”

She was so pretty in this lighting, and her eyes were like emeralds, alive and brilliant. Weren’t ghosts supposed to look pale and--well, dead? Betty looked very much alive and healthy. He could sit here, just staring at her, fascinated by the intelligence in her gaze and the loveliness of her face.

He immediately flushed at his own thoughts. “Are you--are you real?”

She seemed to consider his question. “As real as you.”

“Am I losing my mind?” It seemed silly, he realized, to ask the object of your delusion whether your sanity, or the lack of it, was making you see her, but if Ethel didn’t see her, who else was he going to ask?

Betty shook her head. “Do _you_ think you’re losing your mind? I’m not a doctor. I can’t diagnose you.”

She seemed like a reasonable delusion, if any.

He ducked to rustle around in his backpack, fishing out the thick wax candles he had brought with him for the ouija board.  He lit them and set them aside for lighting. He didn’t want to wear out the batteries on his flashlight.

“So, Jughead,” she began, sitting cross-legged and setting her hands on her lap. “What did you want to know?”

He swallowed, suddenly feeling rude for what he wanted to ask. If he thought about it, asking someone to describe their last moments seemed pretty horrific, especially assuming that hers was sudden and possibly a murder.  “What’s it like, over there?”

She seemed surprised by his question. “Here?”

“On… your side.”

“My side.” She seemed to give it a brief thought. “Chaotic. Pretty shitty a lot of the time. And you? How’s your life?”

It almost sounded like she was teasing. “Same. Can’t wait to get out of this podunk town. College acceptance should be coming in any day now.”

She smirked. “Come now. Aside from Gloria Granbilt, it ain’t so bad if you fly under the radar. Is she still terrorizing Riverdale High? Oh, but you might not know. I didn’t see you in school when I was there and I couldn’t have possibly missed you.”

There was that heat from his neck-up, again. “I wasn’t at Riverdale High when you were here. I’m from the Southside and we just recently got transplanted to Riverdale High when they shut down that other dump of a school. Gloria still rules over Riverdale, but she doesn’t scare me. Where I come from, she’s just a spoiled little rich girl. Unless… she had something to do with your disappearance?”

Betty snorted. “She wishes, but no. She had nothing to do with my disappearance. How’s Ethel, by the way? Did you guys come from a dance, or something? You were all dressed up.”

“Dance,” he grumbled. “Long story. Do you… do you mind talking about how you disappeared? I mean, if it’s not---if it’s not too traumatic.”

She tilted her gaze. “It wasn’t traumatic.”

 _At least._ “Then how did you… pass away?”

“Pass away?”

He swallowed. “You know. Died.”

Again, she pursed her lips and a look of apology seemed to blanket her expression. “I didn’t. Jughead, I am not a ghost. Just like you, I am very much alive.”

 

************************************

She had to go. Someone had called her name from behind her and she hastened tell him that he had to come back some other time to continue this.

He had so many questions, the first being, what the hell did she mean by she wasn’t a ghost?  

She had rushed off so quickly that they hadn’t had time to make arrangements for next time, so he dug around her room for anything adhesive, found some Post Its in the old dresser that worked quite well, and scribbled a time on the underside of it. He wasn’t sure how she would confirm, but he decided he would just show up and wait.

He spent the rest of the following day completely distracted by the anticipation of speaking with Betty again. When he saw Ethel at school, he hid, and in class, he made sure to get as little attention as possible.

He flew under the radar—following all the rules, lying low, taking his lunch at the Serpent table, working his hours at the Drive In, and cleaning up at the trailer.

Just as he’d hoped, his uncle came home drunk, so Jughead left a box of macaroni and cheese on the table for his uncle to find, should Uncle Souphead slide into momentary sobriety and look for something to eat. That was highly unlikely, however, considering that he stank of hard liquor. He would be out until the next morning, and probably late enough for him to think that Jughead had gone off to school.

Jughead took his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a couple of granola bars he had stolen from the school vending machine (by kicking the thing a certain way), and a thermos full of water. He pedalled his way back to Elm street, thinking that if he had to stay overnight, he was ready.

The light of day had long faded by the time he found himself setting up in Betty’s room. He still brought candles, but he had managed to scrounge up extra batteries for his flashlight.

He was kicking off his sneakers when he heard her voice from the mirror.

“Moving in?”

She was in a soft blue sweater, this time, with a V-neck that dipped a little lower than her previous ones.

He blushed fiercely at the thought.

“I wasn’t sure how long I had to wait for you to show up.” He settled down on top of his sleeping bag, taking in the details of her and her room on the other side of the glass. “You ran off so quickly.”

The parallel side was a somewhat accurate reflection of his, except for a few additions on her side. He saw a cheerleading uniform hanging from the closet knob behind her. He could also make out some of her dresser drawer, neat on top, but personalized along the edges of the mirror frame.

She nodded, her fists clenching on her lap. “My mom… can be a little paranoid ever since… well, she’s paranoid.”

She has a mom.

_Well, she had to come from somewhere._

“Betty, if you’re not a ghost, what—?”

Her eyes perked and grew thoughtful. “I’m just a girl, as far as I know, but something happened to me a few months ago. Something very strange.”

He felt it, her curiosity. He wasn’t the only one with questions.

“What made you start looking? For me?” Betty asked.

“Your shadow,” he replied immediately. “I noticed it along the Riverdale High walls. I took pictures, hoping to catch you, and I did—the one by the trophy case. And then I saw your reflection against the glass.”

She nodded, and for the first time he realized that her eyes had been taking him in. “And when did that start? Seeing my shadow?”

“Few weeks after we moved to Riverdale High.”

She bit her lip, her tilted gaze intense as she reached out to press her hand to the glass in front of her. The glass rippled for a moment, then settled. He could see the skin of her hand pressing against the transparent barrier, four crescent moon imprints red and angry across her palm. It struck him that her nails would fit right into those indentations, and whatever Betty Cooper was, she wasn’t resting in peace.

She pulled her hand back and curled it back into her lap. “That day I saw you at the trophy case was not the first time I saw your face, Jughead.”

Her unexpected confession sent his eyebrow arching and his heart inexplicably thumping.

She got on her hands and knees, reaching for something off frame. When she sat back down, she had in her hand a notebook, hardbound in the color of the sky. She flipped the book open to the ribbon marking its pages and read a date from two years ago.

She continued to read from there. “I dreamt of a boy with dark hair and blue eyes, the silliest beanie on his head. He looked up at me expectantly, as if I should know him. His perch upon a ladder leaning against my bedroom window was anything but steady, but he looked comfortable, as if he’d done this before. I remember thinking, ‘Should I know him?’, because I have never seen this boy before, but when he spoke the words, “Hi Juliet. Nurse off duty?”, I suddenly knew him well.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to say.

“I would dream about you,” she said, closing her notebook. “I wouldn’t always remember what we did in those dreams, but I remembered you, and I--” She swallowed. “When they were clear—when I remembered everything, those dreams were vivid, like I was living a second reality, and for a while, it was something like that--I looked forward to sleeping. I withdrew from my life to live the one in my dreams, and it was good. It was _so good,_ so when I first fell through the glass, I thought--”

“Wait--you _fell through the glass?”_

She nodded. She pressed her hand to the mirror again. “Yes, this glass. This mirror. When I first fell through it, I thought I was finally losing my mind. I was where you’re sitting right now, and when I couldn’t get back through, I was terrified. I was in a mirror version of my house, but nobody was in it.  And for a while… for a while I was alone.”

Nevermind that none if this made sense to him, as of yet, but he was certain that little by little, he would piece it together. He would ask the right questions until the puzzle was whole. “In this house?”

“Everywhere.” Her hand swiped across the mirror. “There were people. I can see and hear them, but they can’t see me. It was like I existed but I wasn’t real. I went for a couple of weeks without needing to eat a single thing, then one day I just started to get hungry and then someone noticed me at the grocery store. It’s like I just suddenly got _inserted_ into that reality and people just started appearing in my life. I lived in this—that house with my brother. My sister was gone and I went to school. It was like I had an instant life. An alternate reality.”

This was all blowing his mind and the truth was, he was questioning his sanity. “And how long were you here?”

“Months. I existed there for months, but the knowledge that somehow, I didn’t belong in that reality kept me from coming out and connecting with anyone. The idea that I would make any kind of impression on anyone terrified me. I made two mistakes—I researched and wrote an amazing article for the school paper and then I stood up for Ethel Muggs.”

He could relate. The need to be in the background, to go unnoticed, and yet having something to write and something to stand up for--he couldn’t blame her. “Ethel hasn’t forgotten. And that article--did you submit it for a competition?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. My English teacher did.” She took a deep, drawn out sigh. “Miss Grundy. She passed away while I was there. She was getting along in years and I supposed it worked out for the best. I won the competition, took a picture with the plaque, and that was it. Not much fuss was made about it except for that picture in the trophy case.”

“You look at that trophy case often?”

She shrugged. “I have to. I can still see your world in places. This mirror, that trophy case--that photograph tells me how I’m fading from the consciousness of that world.”

He gave her a mildly contrite look. “And now I’ve noticed you and that picture’s gaining clarity again.”

“That photo and Ethel probably anchored me pretty firmly in your world. I think that’s why you saw me in the first place.”

“Why me, though? Why not Ethel? Why not someone else? Or more importantly, why were you here in the first place?”

She bit her lip, thoughtful. “Why, indeed? But when you’re trapped in another dimension, you don’t quite wonder why you’re there. You just want to get home.”

He bobbed his chin in her direction. “Obviously you did—find a way back. How did you do it?”

She gave a weary sigh. “Creativity? Insanity? And research, I suppose. I ended up reading through topics about parallel dimensions and the mystic arts. There aren’t any astrophysicist lying around in wait around the tri-dales there, but there were mystics aplenty in Greendale. One of them took me seriously: Jim Soonpoon.”

Jughead perked at the familiar name. “Guy with a turban?”

Her eyes widened. “You know him?”

“Met him--and his friend, Todd McGinty.”

Betty’s jaw dropped. “How is that possible?  Todd McGinty isn’t from your world. He’s in mine!”

He frowned. “Well, I don’t know. I met them together.  They seemed real surprised, too. I walked into the Register one afternoon and there they were talking.”

She was frowning, too, almost as if she didn’t believe him. “The Register is a barren office space in your world. I know. I checked. It’s a thriving paper here, but not there.”

He remembered that barren office space, how it looked like there hadn’t been anyone there in years. “Well, it existed that one day I walked in on them.”

The frown faded from her face. Her hard stare was slightly unnerving, but when her eyes softened, he found that he felt comforted by it. “Soonpoon told me there are cracks in realities, that there are people who can walk through them accidentally, rarely because they’re cross dimensional beings, more often because they are a means for the universes to correct mistakes.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “Well, I’m not a cross dimensional being.”

She smirked. “You don’t know that.”

“If I were a cross dimensional being, I would be sonic beaming myself out of this dump of a place.”

She shrugged, the half-smile tilting her lips tightening the slightest bit. “I’ve been in your world, so I get it.”

“So are _you_ a cross dimensional being?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I never belonged in your world. Soonpoon said I was there for a reason--to correct a mistake. I ultimately had to go back where I came from, or else _I’d_ be the mistake, then something else would have to happen to correct it, but I was pulled into your world by something, and that only I would know what that connection was. I was distracted so I didn’t quite give it proper thought. Now… talking to you--I guess I should’ve been paying attention to my dreams.”

His pulse picked up at the implication of her words, and he didn’t quite understand why it was hitting him so hard--this growing realization. Maybe because his entire life was coming back to him, how his singular thought had always been that he didn’t belong, that he would rather watch than be in _it._ It was like his heart was drumming, _I knew it. I knew it. I knew it._

“You think--you _think I’m--”_

“I think I was sent to find you, and us meeting right now? This is the universe correcting its mistake yet again.”

 

********************

 

She’d been dreaming about him.

That confession stayed in his brain like an engraved plaque. She knew him before he knew her. She’d seen him even before he knew she existed.

And he was the only one who could see her now. _The only one._

Still, there were many questions he needed answers to, which was why he was on the bus to Greendale. He didn’t have a lot of time between leaving his early shift at the library to his second job at the Twilight, but he could be in and out, so long as Soonpoon was cooperative--meaning, if he didn’t demand any money.

Greendale was an interesting place, with gothic structures and old family homes surrounded by graveyards. Like Riverdale, it had its divide of the well-off professionals and the lower middle class blue-collar workers. It was a mining town, he heard, and if he were to believe the grumblings, the town was haunted.

Considering all that he’d seen, Jughead wasn’t going to shrug anything off.  

The town certainly embraced the reputation, with establishments taking on horror themes and witchy puns. The local pub didn’t shy away in the least and called itself the Hung Witch.  

Jughead wondered if they even recognized the deeply rooted misogyny that defined that era or if it was just all a joke to them. Probably the latter.

Soonpoon’s Psychic Readings storefront fit right in with the town’s entire atmosphere.  The glass windows were blacked out with curtains, illuminated along its skirts with red lights. A flashing neon sign across the glass said OPEN.

When Jughead pushed through the door, the store seemed empty. He was in a foyer, with an intricately framed mirror and a settee festooned with arranged flyers and business cards. The entryway was cramped, with an imitation Persian carpet on the floor and curtains on both sides in place of doors, and as he looked around the dimly lit foyer, a voice spoke overhead. “I’ve been expecting you, Jughead Jones.”

Jughead tried not to roll his eyes. “Aw. I bet you say that to all your customers.”

“Don’t be smart. Come in through the left curtains.”

As Jughead struggled with the thick fabrics, the OPEN neon sign fizzled out and a distinct click sounded through the foyer. The door had bolted shut by itself. He wondered momentarily if Soonpoon had actually telepathically looked his front door.

“Smart lock,” came the voice overhead. “And no, I am not psychically watching you. I have a hidden camera trained at the foyer.”

“Knew that,” Jughead grumbled, finally pushing through the curtains and opening the door behind it. He walked in, and the psychic theme continued, with images of a bygone era, when spiritualists used cotton to imitate ghostly energy on black and white photographs, where mediums spoke to spirits by candlelight, and the dead were photographed like they were alive.  

Soonpoon popped his head out of the end of the hallway. “You’re walking through the Spirit Hallway.  If you were a real customer, I’d have asked you if you wished to see your future or if you wished to speak to the dead.  The fortune telling’s through the other door.”

Against his better judgement, Jughead’s curiosity was piqued. “Who tells the fortunes?”

“It’s all me.  It just saves me the trouble of having _that_ conversation when people get here. Also, the hallways give me time to prepare the room to how they expect it to look.”

“Smart.”

“Thank you.”

He entered Soonpoon’s workspace. Right now, he had a clothed table with some tarot cards laid out in an intricate pattern. Most of the candles throughout the room were fake, save for the one on the table, which was currently unlit.

“Have a seat, Jones,” Soonpoon said, putting a kettle on to boil on a portable stove top. “How’s your project coming along?”

Jughead had been thinking about how much he was going to tell Soonpoon, but considering the man helped Betty when she was here, he figured he could be a little more forthcoming. “I’ve spoken to her. Betty Cooper.”

Soonpoon frowned. “Oh? By phone? I didn’t think she would still… be so easily accessible.”

“No, not by phone. She’s not in this world anymore. I spoke to her through her mirror.”

Soonpoon froze halfway through sprinkling tea leaves into a mug, then he sighed. “I tell you. People think I’m making all this up. If they only knew what I know.”

He finished with the tea leaves and sat across from Jughead, settling his ringed hands on the table in front of him. “Give me your hand.”

Jughead didn’t want to and perhaps seeing the stubborn look on his face, Soonpoon made a sound of impatience.

Reluctantly, Jughead put his hand on the table and Soonpoon turned it, palm side up, and he stared into its lines.  

After a minute of looking, Soonpoon nodded. “I should’ve known, I suppose. The day you walked into the crack, I probably should’ve figured it out. You saw both of us, Todd and I.”

“I did. Is that weird?”

“Very. You shouldn’t have been able to see the crack in the first place. If you belonged in this world, that store front would’ve been nothing but an empty space. The Register’s been closed for months. Nobody expected it to be open, except for you, and there you were. Todd and I thought you were a cross dimensional, and those lot tend to be… unforgiving about folks like us who look through the cracks, so honestly, that day you walked in on us--I thought I had to kill you.”

Jughead snatched his hand back.  “You _what?”_

Soonpoon waved his own words away dismissively. “Todd’s less impulsive than I. You’re what we call an Anomaly. A cosmic mistake that needs correcting.”

“Great,” Jughead grumbled. “So I’m not even supposed to exist.”

“Oh, you’re meant to exist, Jones. Just not _in this_ world. You probably weren’t even born here. You were definitely born in the right world--we all are, but you can accidentally slip through the portals. I suspect that’s what happened to you. Way before. It mostly happens the minute you’re born. You come out of your mother and you fall through. Don’t ask me how, for I’ve never actually seen it happen, but I’ve traveled the world and I’ve seen other things and other people—anomalies like you wandering aimlessly, never belonging. Always searching.”

Jughead fidgeted uneasily in his seat. It sounded all too familiar, living an aimless life and feeling like an outlier wherever he went.

Soonpoon cast him a sympathetic look. “Some go on to live fascinating lives, some waste away. But there are those, like you, who find that window into the world you belong, where the universe manages to hook you into correcting its own mistake.”

His entire life began to flash through his head, moments upon moments where he wished he were somewhere else, where he wanted to disappear, and how he preferred, always, to watch instead of participate. It was strange to think that he should have been living his life somewhere else, stranger still that he was accepting these words of parallel universes as fact instead of fancy.

He’d known nothing but _this_ life, and no one had told him, outside of drunken frustration and just plain run-off-the-mill cruelty, that he didn’t actually belong in this world.

What would happen if he removed himself from this life and lived the other? Would chaos ensue here? Would they see him over there and wonder where he came from? Would he have to come up with some made up story that he grew up in some state like California or Ohio?

Betty said that when she got here, she simply got _inserted,_ like she belonged there. She never felt like she belonged, but that the people around her simply believed she’d been there all along.

If he were to believe all of this, the same had been done for him, just that he had been a newborn when he came to this world.

“What do I do?” He had no idea.

Soonpoon didn’t seem terribly fussed by it. He gave a small shrug. “You can either stay here--make your way through this life. Difficult, yes, since the universe did not mean for you to be here--it will try to push you back to anonymity at every turn, but others have done it, and there is greatness in defiance. When you fight against the odds, success is far, far more beautiful that you can dare to imagine. But if you choose to take up your true life--if you find a way back, you don’t know that your life there is better. It could be worse. It could be disappointingly ordinary. But your life there is yours to live without the universe telling you no. All of it would be the life you were meant to experience. There are things for you there great and ill, but it’s where you belong and the universe has no right to hold you back.”

Jughead didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. He did not mind anonymity in the least. He’d like it very much if he could exist and be left alone. He had no aspirations for greatness, and yet there was a voice nagging him from within, telling him that these feelings were born from the so-called universe constantly trying to coax him into the shadows.

How different would he be in his true life?

“Would I even have a way to go back there?”

Soonpoon’s lips curled noncommittally. “Probably. You have already walked into the cracks. You already see that world through the glass. It’s where you belong and it’s where the universe wants you to be. Maybe Betty Cooper was sent here to retrieve you. That you can communicate with her now means the universe hasn’t closed that door.”

The thought that he was meant to meet Betty made his stomach turn somersaults. It felt, in the most unlikely way, exciting--an unfamiliar feeling, having lived his entire life unengaged.

“So I should just keep reaching out to Betty.” It was more a realization than a question.

“Only if you want to.”

He stared at Soonpoon. It was strange to want. Not that he’d never wanted anything before. He’d wanted _things,_ like getting away from a dance, or getting out of town, or being left alone, or investigating the ghost that roamed the Riverdale High hallways, but to want something because of _someone--_

This was new.

He could hardly believe his own thoughts. “I want to.”

Soonpoon nodded. “Then do what you must.”

**************************

She was in a flowery red sweater today, with a scalloped waist hem just edging her skirt.

She looked incredibly pretty, which he thought was a little prosaic of him. She seemed, to him, many other things _before_ she was pretty, and yet that came to the forefront of his mind right now, and he was fighting the urge to say it, because it seemed like such an ordinary, adolescent thing to say.

“Are you okay?” she asked, leaning on the heel of her palm.

“I’m fine. I just--I haven’t stopped thinking about y--” Panic. _Jesus Christ._ “Your words.”

_Nice save. Sort of._

She seemed to find amusement in what he said. “Which ones?”

She was fascinating in her expressiveness. He didn’t know much about her, and yet he could understand the language of her face, like he could sit here all day and decipher her thoughts just by how her lips quirked or how her eyes moved, how her brows krinkled and how her chin jutted.

He never thought of himself as the most emotionally intelligent person, but he was was perceiving her in ways he never did for anyone else.

“The ones where you said you dreamt of me.”

Her cheeks reddened, but she smiled, sheepish though it was. “Are you curious to know what those dreams were about?”

He nodded. “I’m curious to know what I was like.”

She gave it a thought, picking up her diary tentatively. For a moment he thought she was going to read passages from it like she did the first time, but she set the diary aside again. “You keep a very small circle of friends, you hate parties, you like to read and write, you can be smug, often sarcastic, but you’re always nice to _me._ You are fiercely protective of the ones you care for, you have a great sense of duty, and you’re dramatic. So dramatic.” She laughed softly.

He thought her laughter pleasing. “Mostly sounds like me. I don’t know so much about those last couple of parts. I’ve never had to protect anything. Hardly had any responsibilities, and drama? Me?”

“It’s just in my dreams. Do you want to know more?”

Yes. Yes, he did. “So what would we do in these dreams?”

She smiled. “All sorts of things. We had milkshakes at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe then swim for hours at the quarry in the summer. We’d bake cookies in the fall or walk through Picken’s Park in the snow. We investigated cases for the school paper or we would just read together at your… house.”

It sounded like things he might like to do. “Is it always just us in your dreams?”

She paused. “Sometimes it includes my next door neighbor, Archie. In the dreams, the three of us are best friends, so Archie has shown up once or twice, but it’s mostly just the two of us…”

He swallowed, another question bubbling to the surface of his thoughts. “So in these dreams, are you and I…?”

She bit her lip, a grin creeping out the side of her mouth. “What?”

He could feel heat rising from the collar of his plaid. “Together?”

She laughed, and again her cheeks burned pink. “Maybe. I’ve had dreams where we would kiss and hold hands _,_ but these dreams aren’t continuations of each other. Sometimes we were together, but there were times we weren’t. Only one thing was constant. I always cared deeply for you in those dreams, no matter what.”

“So why—why did you drive me away that first time I saw you on this mirror?” He touched the mirror’s surface, remembering how she had done the cross dimensional equivalent of slamming a door.

Her eyes widened momentarily before she trained her eyes to the floor. “Oh, well that—I wasn’t expecting to see you on it, and honestly, I was afraid you were some imposter peeping into my bedroom. I wasn’t exactly in the most modest clothes, either.”

He remembered what she was wearing. The details of it were burned into his brain, but now her words stood out to him.  If she was shy about being in skimpy clothing, then it seemed logical to suppose that neither of them had seen each other in less. “So we never—“

She shot him a look. “Jughead.”

He supposed he ought to be ashamed of himself, but in all of his teenage years, he’d never felt compelled to talk about these things with anyone else--had no desire to explore the urges the guys and girls in the gang squawked and squealed about over illegally bought beers. Sex seemed messy and embarrassing the way the Serpents told it and Jughead felt too embarrassed to admit that he felt dead to desire.  So it was almost out of complete curiosity that he was willingly having this discussion with Betty.

Unlike the Serpents, talking about _this_ with Betty felt intimate. “I’m just—I’m curious, okay? I’ve never--“ his face felt like lava. He hadn’t meant to admit _that._ “It would be nice if--”

Her eyes softened. “ _No._ We’ve never. A least not that I remembered.”

_“Ouch.”_

Again, she gave him that look. She shook her head in exaggerated disapproval, though her eyes were shining with mirth.

“Well, am I a good kisser?” he asked.

“Really?”

He put his hands up. “Feedback. For future reference, you know? So, am I?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes. You’re a great kisser.”

He grinned.

 _“In the dream,”_ she added, pointedly. “Don’t look so smug.”

“I’m not!”

“And for future reference? With whom?”

Indeed, with whom?

He shrugged and realized that there was no one, really, as it appeared that the only person he’d ever be interested in was in another reality.

Sarcasm was his favorite defense. “No doubt some lucky lady.”

Betty chuckled.

“There isn’t much for me around here,” he admitted, grumbling.

He hadn’t meant to sound so sad when he said it. It was a little exasperating, for sure, and maybe he was just exhausted at the effort of trying to find meaning for anything.  He touched the surface of the glass lightly with his fingers and was surprised when she pressed her palm up against them.

“So long as this link exists,” she said. “We can talk for as long as you need.”

“Elizabeth!”

It was a familiar distant voice, her mother’s, that made Betty swing her gaze to her bedroom door. “I have to go. I’ll see you again?”

“Yes.” He hadn’t hesitated in the least. “Tomorrow? Is that okay?”

“Same time. G’night, Juggie.”

_Juggie._

She faded from the mirror’s surface, his fingers still pressed to the glass.

 

 

**tbc**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I added a chapter, because I'm me.


	4. Through A Glass

 

 

He dreamt of her.

Like all dreams, you don’t realize you’re asleep, until you do, and before that you’re swept in real emotion, real thoughts, and maybe even real sensations. 

They had been on a worn out old couch, awkwardly sitting side by side, her in a pretty pink dress and him in dress pants, a blouse folded to his elbows, and suspenders. The TV was running, but neither of them had been paying attention to it.

He remembered feeling a deep ache in his chest and a hollow in his gut, because he was afraid and because he  _ missed  _ her. He missed her so much. He missed being with her, talking to her, holding her hand, kissing her… 

Then she said she had to go, and his mind told him  _ It’s now or never, Jones. _

“Stay,” he had said, in a voice barely above a whisper. It wasn’t a demand, it was a plea. “Stay.”

When they kissed it felt real. When his fingers were combing through her hair he could feel the heat from her nape. When their lips touched and moved against one another, it felt true. And when she straddled him, parts of him stirred and stood at attention. His hands had undressed her and his lips had worshipped the valley between her beautiful breasts, but when she told him to slow down, the dream pettered and he gently woke to the light of day.

His breathing was heavy and his fingers longed to feel her shape again. The stiffness in his pajamas was definitely real and his heart hammering through his chest made him break out in sweat.

He was staring up at the ceiling of his uncle’s trailer, his cot shrieking as he shifted to stare at the living room couch. 

It had all been a dream. All of it. 

And yet. 

When that night, he sat in front of the cosmic glass, Betty warmly asking him how his day had been, he could barely look her in the eyes.

He’d already spent the whole day thinking of that dream, embarrassed that having prolonged conversations with a pretty girl was now making him fantasize about her in his sleep, like  _ really, Jones. How fucking ordinary can you get? _

He thought he had been above all that crap, but then there he was, one grind short of a wet dream. 

So he had a crush on a girl from another dimension. Surely he could get a grip.

“Are you okay?” Betty asked, her voice cutting through his thoughts.

He could feel his face flaming. Part of the reason he couldn’t look at her directly was because she looked so amazingly good right now in her nicely fitted shirt and plaid. Add that to the fact that he had a sex dream about her and he was afraid that he would react again.

He’d never been in this situation before, having physical reactions for anyone, and he had no idea if his body would betray him. Even having a pillow across his lap, hiding any evidence—just in case, was little comfort. 

“I’m fine,” he managed to say. “So, ugh, these dreams you had—“

“Have.”

He swallowed. “You’re still having them?”

She nodded. “They started again when I got back here.”

“I see.” His mouth felt dry. He hadn’t told her what Soonpoon had told him, that he possibly should have lived a life on her side of the mirror. Maybe she’d made some connection in her head, because she did express the theory that she was sent into his world to retrieve him. “Do you think—do you think these aren’t just dreams?”

She shot him a look, as if to convey  _ well, the answer to that is obvious. _

He scrambled for words. “I mean, I  _ know  _ that they’re not ordinary dreams, considering you were having them before you knew I existed, and that possibly you fell through the glass to find me, but do you think your dreams are about the life you and I would’ve lived if I had actually been there? Like—“

“An alternate reality,” she finished, her eyes growing wide.

He let out a breath, relieved that it had finally been said out loud. 

“I dreamt of you last night,” he admitted. He didn’t know if this was a good idea, but he did intend to keep the more intimate parts of it low key. “You and I were on my uncle’s couch, and you were in this pink dress. I was dressed up, too, and we were watching TV.”

Her eyes widened with surprise. “No, we weren’t.”

_ Holy shit. _

“The TV was on but we weren’t watching,” she continued. 

Heat blasted from his collar. “You’ve had this dream.” It wasn’t a question.

She seemed less embarrassed. “Not this one. This was new. Last night—“

“Last night? You dreamed this last night?”

She nodded. “We were on the couch, like you said, and I was in a pink dress. Your blouse was blue and you were wearing suspenders,”

His heart thudded through his chest. “Yes. Yes, I was. It’s the same dream, Betty. We--” He felt his face flaming. “We--I asked you--”

“To stay. You asked me to stay, and I remember feeling  _ happy  _ that you wanted me to. And all I could think was that I missed kissing you so much.”

He wanted to go on, to seek affirmation for what they did in this dream, but he was trying to find words that wouldn’t cheapen it, because it had felt intense. 

She smiled, perhaps shyly, this time. “It felt—special. Awkward, maybe. Like it—like it was our first time—“

He was spellbound, barely breathing where he sat. If they were dreaming the same thing at the same time, it was like they were meeting in this alternate reality in spite of the glass separating them. 

“I didn’t want you to go.”

“And I didn’t want to leave.”

He didn’t know exactly what to do with this knowledge, and from the looks of her, neither did she. 

In the dream he loved her. He loved her so much, but the reality was  _ this _ , and it was preposterous to overlay dreams with what was real, and yet if they were dreaming the same thing…

“You broke my heart once,” she said, her throat bobbing and her eyes shining. “But I think I broke your heart, too.”

He wanted to laugh, but it felt inappropriate, now knowing how real those emotions had felt. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be. Because clearly, we both made up for it.”

*****************

He kept on dreaming.

_ They  _ kept on dreaming; the same dreams every night when they were together in it, different when they were apart.

And it was harrowing to wake up to the reality, where they were separated by glass, or more importantly, where they have to remind themselves that they  _ hadn’t  _ lived that life. He knew, most keenly, how she must have felt when she began to think that her dreams were better than the life he was living. 

School had become a means to get through the day--a cover of sorts so that no one would get suspicious and catch him smiling to himself in his most private thoughts. Ethel almost always talked to him when she saw him in the hallways, and he would try to engage, but he was always quick about it--he never wanted those conversations prolonged. 

At lunch, when he sat the Serpents’ table, he hid behind the more bombastic proclamations of his lunchmates, letting the shadows cast by their heavy leather jackets drown him out of sight. Under the cover of gang, he would take out a notebook, scribble the remnants of a remembered dream--not the parts that were his and Betty’s, not the parts where they made out in the Blue & Gold, or the one where he let her wear his beanie around a campfire. Not those.

These were scribblings of a different set of dreams. 

What went into that notebook were clues, clues to their dreams about a murdered boy--bits and pieces that presented themselves, never in chronological order. Those dreams were a puzzle and both he and Betty felt challenged to solve it. 

They probably shouldn’t find murder so entertaining, but it was hard to be so somber about the subject matter when they had convinced one another that this was merely a window into what could have been, but didn’t actually happen. 

And yet.

Funny, that he could shrug off the awful murder bits but cling to the parts that were about him and Betty holding hands, kissing in the rain, walking in the snow, or climbing her bedroom window. He had dreamt of his raging passion for her, holding Betty against his body, practically slamming her onto the kitchen counter while he pushed her shirt up over her head and tasted the column of her neck. 

When they’d talked about  _ that  _ dream, she had blushed so hard, laughing behind the cover of her hands. He had watched her, enthralled by the smile on her face, thinking  _ yeah, I did that. _

Those. Those were the dreams he liked the most. 

****************

Then there were dreams that pained him, of him and Betty at odds, when he saw her from a distance because he couldn’t approach her, like they were broken up. 

He’d had a dream where he caught a glimpse of another girl with pink hair and mesh stockings, her lips touching his and him liking it. 

He woke up from that dream guilty and oddly heartbroken. Did he, at some point, be with someone else? Was Betty ever with someone else? He’d caught her in some dreams looking at her neighbor, Archie, with the softest eyes. He ached as he watched her pine for another boy in wrenching silence. 

There was that dream, too, where some jock had come into the Blue & Gold to confirm whether he and Betty were still on for some date, and Jughead woke up feeling incredibly pissed off. 

Jughead carried his feelings of jealousy into the waking world the entire day, asking Betty when they next met, “How’d your date go?” She had seemed stunned by his tone, and perhaps because he sounded like a jerk, she merely arched an eyebrow and said, “It didn’t happen last night.” 

That response irked him to no end, because he had perhaps expected something like, “It’s nothing, Juggie,” or “It wasn’t a date. It’s probably for the investigation,” but her “It didn’t happen last night,” grated at him, because it could mean she was interested in finding out, or worse, that these dreams were just like episodes to her, like a TV show instead of their alternate lives.

So when he dreamed of this pink haired girl, he struggled about whether or not he would tell Betty, because somehow, deep down, he believe that all of this mattered.  

He went to Elm almost every night now, managing his uncle and his moods in various creative and questionable ways. His sleeping bag was now a permanent fixture in Betty’s room. 

Of course, he could just sleep in Betty’s bed--had slept on her bed after dusting it off, but the bed and the mirror seemed so far away from each other, sometimes, and he didn’t dare move the mirror for fear of breaking the connection. 

So when they both drifted off into sleep, their conversation in the plane of reality gently floating into their world of dreams, it felt like they were near, nothing but a sheet of glass between them, instead of time and improbable dimensions. 

****************

“So there was this girl,” he muttered, pushing his beanie off his head so he could fiddle with it in his hands. “I think her name’s Toni.”

Betty looked up from an article she was reading to him--an article she had written for her school paper. Sometimes they took a break from the dreams, from the murder puzzle, and they just talked about what was going on with  _ them  _ in their “real” lives.

More her, than him. She had many things going on over there. He, on the other hand, had long since decided that he was living day by day, future plans a Nice-to-Have rather than something he could directly affect. 

But they always circled back to talking about their dreams, because they  _ both  _ knew by now, those dreams were real in another world, in a life they would have been living if they had existed on the same plane like they should’ve. 

“Toni.” She said the name softly, and she nodded, her face turning red. “Was that who you were with when you didn’t answer my calls?”

He sighed and nodded. When he woke up from this dream, he yelled at himself for being so incredibly stupid. “I wasn’t cheating on you, I swear. Toni and I weren’t doing anything like that. We were just talking about the cypher, and school, and gangs, but I did choose to ignore your call when I was with her.”

She seemed surprised by this—at his admission or at what he had done, he wasn’t sure. It could be both. “Why? Did you like her better than me?”

“No,” he replied quickly. “No. I did not like her better than you. I liked her as a friend, and maybe I was flattered by her attention, but I loved  _ you,  _ and it wasn’t attraction to her that made me ignore your call. It was everything else--my move to Southside High, my isolation from you, their acceptance of me in that school...I was thinking that if this was my new life, I might as well start putting down roots in Southside High, accept my fate, and not cling to a school that didn’t want me, and you were the only reason I was looking back at it.”

Her lips pursed and her eyes looked mournful. “I was a nuisance to you.”

“I was an idiot.”

“I saw you with her at the diner.”

He chuckled softly. “I think you’d just dumped me the day before.”

“Great recovery time.”

He sighed and looked away. Their dreaming still wasn’t chronological, but they were having enough of them to piece timelines together, figuring out the order of events through sheer frequency. 

There were many times he’d wake up, frustrated at the things he’d done and didn’t do, but he was powerless to change his choices in that other life. He was there as the Jughead he was supposed to be, but his decisions were informed by what was happening then, and as terrible as he knew they were upon waking, he always thought they were right decisions when he walked in those dreams. 

“Sometimes, the dreams don’t look like we’re in a great place,” he said, feeling a sense of defeat at the inevitability of the story that had been written for them. “But I never seem to stop caring about you, not even when we’re apart.”

It was strange to tell her that he cared for her as if those feelings were strictly confined to the dreams, when the truth was that the lines in between were beginning to blur for him. Sometimes he thought she wasn’t so sure, either. 

“Well, I like talking to  _ you,”  _ she said, softly. “Can we agree that no matter what happens in those dreams, we can keep having this? Those dreams are a different world.  _ We  _ are different from the Jughead and Betty in our dreams.”

He had to ask himself if that last part was true, that they were  _ different.  _ Time and time again, he’d watched dream Jughead make mistakes, and while he knew, cognitively, where his dream version had gone wrong, his real self knew that he wouldn’t have chosen any different.

“Can we?” he asked, touching the mirror. “Keep having this?”

Was that even possible? He liked being with Betty, even if if it was just through this window into another world, but was this good for either of them? To be caught up in a different reality that neither of them could live or affect? At some point, they would have to move on from doing this, and then what? Would this bridge between dimensions fade away?

Would he never see her again? It hurt to think that. It really did.

“What happens when you go off to college, Betty? Or when we  _ both  _ go? Do you think we’d always have this mirror? The dreams? Or will this window just close as time passes? Would I remember you still? Will you?”

Her mouth hung open, words eluding her, but even as she seemed to compose herself against the onslaught of questions, she was shaking her head. “I don’t know. I don’t have answers for you. All I know is right now, I like what we have—this connection, this  _ bond.” _

_ Bond.  _

She wasn’t wrong. Calling it a friendship seemed inadequate. Calling it a relationship was reaching for things well beyond reasonable. A bond was exactly what they had, but it was a comfortable label for something that was enabling complicated feelings in his chest.

He knew who the Betty in the dreams were--fierce, brilliant, passionate, and deeply caring. He would love someone like her for real. And the Betty sitting across from him was just like her dream counterpart, minus the murdered classmates and the hiding of dead bodies.

“Bond,” he said, as if to try the word out loud. 

She seemed to think he disagreed with the word _.  _ “What do you want me to call it, Juggie? We are speaking through a glass with no door. We walk the same dreams acting out a script we have no control over.”

His immediate impulse was to tell her that sometimes, the dreams felt like they were casting an overlay over his waking world, that the dreams were beginning to feel like echoes of a life that was his, but not. 

These days, the extraordinary sheet of glass between them was the only thing that was so starkly tangible. 

He pressed his palm to the mirror and wordlessly, she met it with her own, and while the surface rippled momentarily, he could feel nothing except the glass. There was no warmth from her body, no sensation of breaking water, just the cold, smooth plane of a mirror. 

“What I feel in those dreams don’t go away when I wake up,” he said, softly. “Dream or not—who we are in them, you know it’s you, and I know it’s me. Put in those situations, you and I would do exactly what our other selves have done in that other reality.”

She didn’t contradict him and for a minute they sat in silence, their faces closely set in their respective realities. He wanted so badly to reach through the mirror, but the barrier of time and space prevented him, and frustration began to bubble in his chest. 

His phone rang and he sighed, shaking his head as he tore his hand away to look at it. His uncle was calling him. 

Uncle Souphead seldom called, and when he did it was because he needed Jughead to do something for the gang, often for days at a time. If Jughead didn’t pick up, he would get reamed and thrown out of the trailer for a week, and while it wasn’t hard to find shelter, it was inconvenient to deal with the lack of other essentials, like food, bathrooms, toothpaste, and just clothes, really. 

“I gotta go,” he told her, apologetic, as he gathered some of his things into his backpack. He let the call go to voicemail for the moment. Uncle Souphead was going to hate that, but he couldn’t just leave her without explaining. 

“Is everything alright?”

He couldn’t answer that. “My uncle wants me to go out and do--” He figured he shouldn’t tell her the things he was being asked to do. She didn’t have to know that part of his life so intimately. “--gang stuff. I don’t know for how long but these things can last a few hours or a few days.”

“I’ll--I’ll be here everyday.”

He looked up at her, feeling grateful. Wanted, even. And he wished he could promise her that he’d be back just as often, even if it’s just a few minutes at a time, but when he was being asked to do these things, he had no control over his time. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.” 

“Okay.” Her hand fell back into her lap. “Be careful, Juggie. Please.”

He had to rush, calling his uncle right back as he headed out of the house.

“Where the hell are you, kid?” Uncle Souphead growled. 

“Library. Had to get out of it before I could answer your call. What’s up?”

“Gas up your motorcycle, kid. I need you to make a few runs for a couple of nights.”

His heart sank. “But my job--”

“I’ll pay you good to make up for it, so I don’t want to hear you bitching. Get over here right now and don’t make me call you again.”

 

**********************

 

He felt naked without his beanie. 

When he got back to the trailer, he realized he didn’t have it on. His uncle pointed it out and he felt true panic at the prospect that he would have to walk amidst the Serpents without something to cover his head. 

He raked through the pile of winter clothing and found a red ski hat. It was a pretty atrocious color, but he jammed it over his hair and felt instantly protected. A couple of people pointed it out to him, asking about the change, but he ignored them, knowing they wouldn’t insist.

The next few nights, he did his Uncle’s bidding, transporting packages from location to location on his motorcycle. He tried to find time during his waking moments to drop into Elm and leave a note for Betty to find, but the runs kept him out late and he could barely grab any sleep, so getting up early to swing past Betty’s house was impossible, and unless he wanted to cut class, he didn’t have time to pay her even a quick visit.

But the runs did end, and when he could get away from his uncle, he trudged back to Elm on his pedal bike, exhausted but relieved. He was hopeful, too, that Betty hadn’t thought badly about his prolonged absence. 

He had missed her. Fiercely, and even if he only saw her and spoke to her for a few minutes that evening, it would do him a world of good. 

She wasn’t at the mirror, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. He’d had to wait for her to appear on occasion, but he did feel considerable distress at the fact that his beanie was nowhere to be found. He scoured her room, even the bathroom, and he began to think he had left his beanie elsewhere.  

As he settled on his sleeping bag, unable to think past his missing beanie, his exhaustion caught up with him and he fell asleep. 

**************

A faint voice, pleasant and comforting, nudged him awake.

It was dark in the room, but the mirror’s surface was illuminated by Betty’s bedside lamp.

He blinked himself to waking, pushing himself off his sleeping bag.  “Shit. I must’ve dozed off. It’s been a rough four days.”

Her eyes were warm with concern.  “Are you okay?”

He nodded. “I’m fine. Just tired, but I’m good now. I just--” he paused, knowing that his next words were true. “I needed to see you. I missed you.”

A faint smile lifted the corner of her lip. “I missed you, too. I’ve gotten used to telling you how my day went, and--Jug, there’s something else.”

Anxiety struck him. Something about her voice told him this was significant, and he dreaded the possibility that it was something like, “I may have to go away,” or “I think something is going wrong.” It had that quality, or maybe he was just cynical. “What? What’s going on?”

She reached for something out of frame, but when he saw it, he recognized it immediately. It was sitting in her hands, her finger nestled into its soft, familiar wool.

“I think I may have found your beanie.”

 

tbc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I may have added another chapter. Sorry. Or not. Depending on whether this annoys you or otherwise.
> 
> I suck.


	5. Broken Glass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm releasing Chapter 5 and 6 together, because format. :D
> 
> Hope you like it.

“H-How--”

She shook her head, but her eyes were shining with something inexplicable. “I found it on the floor after you ran off. It was just there, and I recognized it immediately. Jug--”

His hands shot up to the mirror’s surface, feeling around it, wondering if there were places that his hat could have slipped through. His heart had picked up its pace, and he watched the glass for any kind of shift. Anything to indicate a change.  “There must have been a slip of some kind.” He ran his fingers along the corners, scouring every inch. “It fell through, and if it did, then I can, and we can--” _We can be together._

They hadn’t talked about any of those possibilities. He didn’t know if she felt enough for him to want that. He knew he’d tried to hold his feelings back because of their circumstances. It was too painful to want someone without the chance of being with her, but his hope was surging and so were his feeling. He wanted, so badly, to touch her.

There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Frustration erupted from within and he banged his hand against the mirror’s frame. It shook as he stepped back, his hands grabbing his head for a beanie that wasn’t there. He ended up raking his fingers through his hair.

“I tried that, already,” she said, softly. “I tried. I meditated. I willed for some—some portal to open. The last time I fell through, I was unspeakably alone. I couldn’t summon that loneliness back up this time, because now I know you’re on the other side.”

“I should stay here. In your room,” he said. “Sleep here. Maybe it won’t happen while we’re awake. Maybe I’ll just wake up and I’ll be there.”

She laughed, but it withered immediately. She worried his beanie in her hands. “Is that what you want? To be here? You don’t know if you can get back through.”

He shook his head and approached the mirror. “Why would I want to come back to this? I’m at my gangbanger uncle’s beck and call, doing shit that’s probably illegal, hoping to one day leave town and never return--there’s nothing for me here, Betts.”

“You don’t know what your life here will be,” she said, her brows knotting with concern. “In our dreams, you’re in a gang, too. You’ve had to do questionable things. Your father is a drunk. You were homeless. You were--Jug, I don’t know if being here will be any different--”

“ _You’re_ there. That makes all the difference.”

Some of the worry seemed to wane from her gaze. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I feel.”

“Jug.”

She didn’t need to answer that. He was just relieved to let some of his pent up feelings out.

“I’ll stay here tonight.”

“But your uncle—“

“What difference does it make if I’m going to leave him behind?”

She sighed, granting him an indulgent smile. They didn’t know if the portals would let him through, but one night probably wasn’t going to ruin his life.

“Soonpoon said the universe will want to correct its mistake,” Jughead said. “Me, being here is a mistake.”

She looked at the beanie in her hand then she pressed the material up against her cheek. “It’s as soft as I thought it would be.”

It gave him great pleasure to realize that she’d thought about touching the beanie and wondered about how it would feel in her hands. “It’s a little worn out. An old thing.”

Her smile was one of affection. “I think it gives you character, but I like it when you take it off, too. You seem more relaxed when you do.”

He only ever took it off before going to bed, and when he woke up in the morning, his hands would instinctively pull the beanie over his head as got off his cot.

It goes where he goes. It is the only thing that he feels close to in this world, now it’s gone ahead to the other side and he felt its pull. He touched the beanie’s reflection. “I don’t think I remember a time I never had that thing on. I don’t even remember getting it. It was just always there. Maybe it’s the key.”

Wouldn’t that be convenient? To have this thing all his life only to have it be the thing to pull him through. Judging by her soft laughter, she was skeptical about that herself. “I’ll keep it close. Just in case.”

He liked this picture of her, holding his beanie close, keeping it near.

How would that be like, for him, getting drawn into her world? Would he just show up in her bed? Would the universe have to acclimate him like it did her when she fell into his world? Would he have to walk around like a ghost for a couple of weeks before anyone saw him? How about Betty? Would she know he was missing?

He didn’t want to be worried about what might happen. All he knew in his bones was that he wanted to get to the other side.

His beanie had already made it, and where it goes, he goes.

 

****************

 

Soonpoon was charging him this time, but only because he had shown up in the middle of the day, nudging aside a paying customer so he could be seen, immediately.

Jughead wasn’t fussed. He had money from running with his uncle. More money than usual, which he realized was all the temptation he needed to ditch school forever and live his life working for the gang. It was just one of the many reasons he had to leave this shitty life behind.

“My hat got through the mirror,” he told Soonpoon. “One minute it was on my side of reality and then it was on hers. I want to make that happen to me.”

Soonpoon sighed and shook his head. “Things get lost through the portals all the time. Where do you think missing socks go?”

Jughead frowned. “If I have to tumble myself dry to get there, I would. Tell me how to get to the other side!”

“If I knew how to jump between realities, I would. I can only ever look through cracks, which is how McGinty and I communicate, but we can’t open portals at will. You’ll need a cross dimensional being for that, and trust me, you don’t ever want to encounter those. They guard their portals jealously. They will kill anyone who dares to use the ones they’ve claimed stake to—“

“Fine, no cross dimensional beings. I get it, but you have to know how to get through. You told Betty how she can get back to her world. I am asking you to do the same thing! Her world is _my_ world.”

Soonpoon made a sound. “You are far too tangled in this world to apply what I told her to do. I told her to disappear and melt away, figuratively. The reality will follow suit. You won’t find that so easy, no matter how isolated you think you’ve made yourself.”

Jughead felt frustration bubble up in his chest, and then anger. If he ever thought that this world was holding him back, he never knew how true it was in the literal sense until now. “So what are you saying? That I’m stuck here? What the fuck even was the universe trying to accomplish, showing me my true life, if it isn’t going to let me go back to it?”

Soonpoon frowned. “Don’t yell at me. It’s not like I have an oracle where I can just dial up the universe and ask it these questions.”

He hadn’t even realized he was yelling and he fell back in his seat, chagrined. “I’m sorry. I just—I want to be where I belong.”

He never thought he would ever say that. Not belonging was his thing. Not being like anyone was how he had wanted to live this life, but Betty made him feel like belonging somewhere—with someone, and it only then occurred to him that belonging was a need everyone eventually fell into. You just needed it to be with the right people.

“Listen.” Soonpoon’s voice cut through Jughead’s thoughts. “I don’t have much reference for people such as yourself, getting caught in the wrong realities. When I told Betty to ‘erase’ herself, it was easy enough for her to do it in a somewhat low-key manner. She was still just in the background of this life. You’ve lived here all your life and there are people here who _won’t_ let you erase yourself. They will cling to you. Wrenching yourself away may require more drastic measures.”

Jughead felt dread in the pit if his stomach. “Drastic measures? Like, what, drastic measures?” He lowered his voice, eyes wide with terror. “Like, _murder?”_

Soonpoon looked extremely annoyed. “No, you dramatic fool! Not _that_ drastic. I meant burning bridges. Cutting relationships. Isolating yourself in an active way.”

Jughead’s relief was so enormous that he didn’t care that Soonpoon had called him a fool.

“And mind you, all this is theoretical, but people have been known to tell the universe what they want and sometimes, the universe listens.”

It sounded like a leap, but given everything that has happened since he first started seeing Betty’s shadow, he couldn’t discount Soonpoon’s theory.

Cutting himself off would be easy enough. Uncle Souphead didn’t care for him in any familial way. Jughead was useful to him. His uncle was probably getting reimbursed by the state for taking him in. If Jughead stopped showing up at the trailer, Uncle Souphead might wonder about his absence for as long as it inconvenienced him and not more.

The Serpents would hardly give a shit. Nobody in school cared that much—his teachers in Riverdale didn’t know him long enough to be concerned and he had no friends who might go looking for him.

He could quit his job at the drive-in and the manager would shrug. The library was halfway to firing him what with his Uncle having kept him away the last several days.

There really wasn’t anyone who would be bothered by his going away.

He resolved to make his escape. He can hide out in the janitor’s closet at school if he had to, using the facilities for hygiene and perhaps food. He had enough money at the moment to purchase sustenance should his options grow thin. Hopefully, by the time his money ran out, he’d be gone from this world.

“What happens if it doesn’t work out?” Jughead asked.

Soonpoon shrugged. “Then you’d have turned this life to shit for nothing. It’s a gamble, but--”

“Honestly coudn’t get any worse than it already is.”

He knew, as he said it, that it was true. And given the state of his life now, it could perhaps only get better. Finding a way to the world he belonged—that was a step up in itself.

 

********************

 

Jughead’s goal was to disappear, and he first started doing so by moving himself out of his uncle’s trailer.

He didn’t have that many things to begin with. Everything valuable to him can fit in a large duffle bag—clothes, a couple of pairs of shoes, his beat up laptop, some toiletries, and a select number of books for leisure and school.

He stored most of those things in Betty’s house, where he slept and spent most of his evenings.

He kept going to school, just so he could avail of lunch, the vending machine, clean running water, and the showering facilities.

Just as he thought, his uncle didn’t even ping him on his prepaid phone.

At school, Jughead withdrew from the Serpents even more, and after a couple of weeks with this routine, he woke up one night, rising from his sleeping bag in Betty’s room, and began to write.

When his laptop ran low on its battery, he got dressed, pedaled his way to the 24 hour diner, and plugged in.

He wrote until the sun rose. He wrote until he had to go back to class, and when he couldn’t stand to be in class anymore, he left school, just after lunch, to write some more.

He didn’t know why writing this story was so important. He didn’t even think it was that. It just felt like he had a world of words in his head, and that writing had never quite felt like this before.

Writing, to him, had been about finishing papers and having something to submit in class. It had never been a means to express his thoughts or a desire to tell a story.

But last night, the only thing more restless than his fingers was his mind.

When he returned to Elm street that night, he told Betty that he’d cut class, and of course she was worried. She wouldn’t be Betty if she weren’t.

“Jug, are you sure you should do that? What if a portal never opens? You’d want to be able to have _some_ place to go if you’re stuck there, like college.”

“I started writing a story,” he said, pulling up his laptop and opening a document.  

He could see her slight hesitation. She was probably wondering whether she should allow him to deflect, but Betty could never resist putting on that editor’s cap. She took his bait. “What, about?”

He managed, with a lot of willpower, to resist a grin. “A murder.”

He began reading his opening paragraph. “Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world: safe, decent, innocent. Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale.”

He could see her surprise, but her intensely expressive and beautiful eyes shone with intelligence. “Read me some more.”

And so he did. He read her all 5,000 of the words that poured out of him since early that morning. It was the tale of the gunshot heard on the 4th of July, of a missing boy later found dead in the river, of suspects plucked from classrooms and their photographs pinned to a cork board, and of teenagers who witnessed anguish, violence, and illicit, illegal affairs.

It was their story, still incomplete, but formed by their dreams and their bond.

“Juggie,” she whispered. “Your writing.”

“It’s a story,” he explained. “It’s in a style I’ve never quite tried before.”

“It’s amazing. How long have you been—“

“This morning. It started this morning. And I wrote and wrote and I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what got into me, but I needed to write it just like that.”

He could see the wonder in her eyes. How ideas were bubbling in her brain. “Have you ever written anything like that before?”

“Never. It was never like that. I’ve read you my paper, my book reports, and my essays for school. _This_ sounds like me, but not quite. Do you know who else writes like this?”

They both knew the answer. The Jughead in their dreams wrote stories in exactly the same way. Maybe she knew it even better, because she’d read his writing in these dreams more than he has. She’d picked every article he’d ever written for the Blue & Gold apart. She’d taken his work and crossed out all those dramatic words, sacrificing adjective after adjective for more concise, impassioned words that journalists were expected to use.

“Keep writing,” she told him. It sounded like an order. “Keep writing just like this.”

He already knew he would. Amidst everything that was happening, writing felt like a lifeline. It was all he wanted to do.

Aside, perhaps, from being with Betty beyond the plate of glass between them.

There were gaps in the story, just as there were gaps in their dreams. He could fill in those gaps with fiction, because the reality, as it stood now, was that this story wasn’t real. It was a book written from his imaginings, but he wasn’t inspired to make events up. Not for this. It was imperative he told the tale as he witnessed it.

And if he kept at it, he would. Whatever power that allowed his beanie through into Betty’s world was letting Jughead take on the thoughts and desires of the Jughead he knew in their dreams. It hadn’t been so much a conscious thought to begin writing this story as it was an irresistible impulse. He wasn’t being controlled by some disembodied entity. He was becoming the Jughead Jones he was meant to be.

He stared at Betty’s reflection, realizing that her eyes shone with hope, that his beanie lay close by her knee, and that her body was leaning forward with her fingers on the glass. Her perfect ponytail framed her lovely face, her pouty lips were made redder by the worrying of her teeth.

He would do anything for her. Absolutely anything.

He traced the shape of her face with his fingers. “I wish I could kiss you.”

She didn’t laugh. “You kiss me almost every night.”

“You know what I mean,” he whispered, staring at her lips.

She nodded, leaning her forehead against the glass. He touched his own onto the mirror. She seemed like a hair’s-breath away, and yet he couldn’t feel her.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

She did. He did, too. And he wanted, more than anything, to fall through the glass, just so he could have that moment, of his lips on hers, of his fingers in her hair, of their bodies filling the distance.

He is telling the universe what he wants, and maybe it would listen, if only for a moment.

Just one moment.

So when he opened his eyes and Betty’s room was gone, when he found himself sitting in a dark plain where there was nothing but a mirror’s empty frame and Betty on the other side of it--he didn’t waste a single moment trying to figure things out.

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.

 

*****************

 

He didn’t need to understand where they were. He didn’t need to know. He’d been living in his dreams for weeks. He knew, upon waking, how it was to be carried by the tide of unconscious reality, how his dream self accepted what was happening without pause or question.

This was not a dream. This was a crack in time and space. He didn’t create it. She didn’t, either. This was the universe feeling generous. Or perhaps this was what happened when you buy into the universe’s plan to right a wrong.

She smelled like honey lavender and her skin felt soft against the pads of his fingers. Her own fingers felt warm against the back of his hand.

But those details were but flashes against the overwhelming sensations of her lips responding to his, all softness and warmth, the passing of breath between them, slowly deepening as they came to realize that this was happening outside of a dream and that they need not question it now.

The soft suck of air between their lips gave him a moment of sense, letting his arm wrap around her body and pulling her through the mirror’s frame to settle her on his lap.

He became all too aware of the fact that his hand was clamped firmly to the back of her thigh, because her skirt was short and riding even higher up her leg.

He felt the shift of her arms over his shoulders, encouraged the ways their mouths sought to be fused, responded to the electricity her fingers were generating as she combed them through his hair.

Finally, after minutes of reveling in this bliss, she asked, between breaths, where they were.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled against the skin of throat. “Does it matter?”

She didn’t reply immediately, sighing and tilting her chin to give him more access. “I want to take you back with me, when we’re--” She made a sound. It may have been in response to the flick of tongue against the lobe of her ear. Or maybe the gentle tug of his teeth.

They’d made out heavily in their dreams so many times. He knew what she liked.

He tugged the tie of her hair loose, and his fingers plunged into the softness of tresses so often restrained in her ponytail. He didn’t know how long they had. Any minute now, this crack in reality can dissipate and he wouldn’t know how to call it back up.

His only thought was to make the most of this, and for several blissful and increasingly hormonal minutes, it seemed that he and Betty were in complete sync.

The sounds she made went straight to the pit of his stomach, sending parts of him aching with need. His fingers traced the v-shaped collar of her cardigan and even when his lips were preoccupied with hers, his thoughts were hyper focused on where his hand was allowed to go.

His fingers slipped beneath the soft material, feeling skin beneath the pads of them and the strap of her tank top over his cuticles. He was hardly aware of the sounds he was making himself, as his hand slowly began to trace the lacy edge of her bra. There was a slope, both soft and taut, pressing back against his touch, and his excitement was taking his breath away.

“Can I?” he asked.

She sucked in air as they kissed, and his fingers worried the delicate material of her strapless undergarment.

_Just say the word. Just tell me I can._

He moaned in frustration.  “Baby, please?”

She tore her lips away, though their foreheads were pressed together, and he attempted to connect their lips again, but the press of her palms against his shoulders forestalled him.

“What?” he asked, confused. Had he done something wrong?

 _Too fast,_ he suddenly thought, growing mortified at his apparent inability to resist his baser instincts.

For God’s sake, they were both of them beings from two completely different dimensions meeting in some In Between and all he could think about was making out with her?

“I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I’m--”

Any further ramblings were forestalled by the more gentle caresses of her lips. The firm press of her hands cupping his face eased some of his embarrassment, but the fervor was swaying to a calmer rhythm, slowing things down until he could feel the slow rise and fall of his chest.

“We should be trying to find a way out of here, don’t you think?” she suggested as she caught her breath.

The rational part of him, so small at the moment in some far flung corner of his mind, piped up in agreement with her, but even her voice was so softly unconvincing that it was difficult to allow his saner self to take over.

He never knew, until now, how overwhelming desire could be. Even with the dreams, he still believed himself above his libido. He couldn’t possibly be so horny that he would fling reason to the wind. But he realized that his arrogance had no foothold against the feel of Betty in his arms. She could take him down with a single look and he would be on his knees, promising her the world for her touch.

What, even, had he been planning to do? How far had he wanted to take it?

_All the way._

He was, as Soonpoon called him, a fool. First of all, there really were more important things--bigger things to be concerned with, and secondly, he didn’t have a single condom on him. Like, really, what applied in this In Between? What kind of madness would it cause, if the unthinkable happened and his-- _swimmers--_ managed to find their way, and he and Betty ended up separated by dimensions again while something otherworldly grew in her?

“We should be,” he began, slowly. “Looking for doorways.”

He had no idea if what he said was correct, and as they looked around them, nothing but the mirror’s frame visible for what appeared to be miles around, they had no place to start.

He irrationally began to think that they should just go back to making out.

_Stop it._

Carefully, Betty got to her feet, though her hands slipped into his to pull him up with her.

Sighing, he did get up, and as she scanned the void, he watched her think, and he wished, most ardently, that they could just exist here, being with each other.

She caught him staring and she tilted her chin, her eyes mildly scolding him.

A soft chuckle bubbled up his throat. “What, now? What’d I do?”

“We need to figure this out.” She tried to say it firmly, but he could see the corners of her mouth tugging upwards.

He never knew that he could adore someone this much, that he could be this soft inside for someone else. “I am doing just that.” His hand perched lightly over the crook of her neck and shoulder, his fingers restless against her skin. “But there’s nothing _but_ you.”

A blush rose up her neck and she whined softly, but she stepped closer, and they were at it again, lips brushing together, mouths opening to accept one another, his hands and arms crushing her closer.

He grinned into the kiss. “What happened to--”

“Shush, before I change my mind.”

He all but hauled her aloft, but something banged in the distance, echoing loudly in the void. It was enough to make their bones clatter.

Their bodies whipped into the direction of the sound.

Jughead was shocked into ice cold terror. He remembered Soonpoon’s words. You never wanted to encounter a cross dimensional being. They guarded their portals jealously. They will kill anyone who dared to use doors they had laid claim to.

Betty began to move and Jughead frantically grabbed at her wrist. “N-NO!”

His voice echoed and he clamped his lips shut, gesturing for her to be quiet, not that they could hide anywhere. They were both in plain sight. Still. “I don’t think we should go to it.”

“But it’s _something,_ Juggie. What if it’s a portal?”

“What if it’s something else? Something dangerous?”

Her eyes widened. “Like a cross dimensional being?”

Of course she knew. She’d told him about them first, though she had been teasing him, then, asking him if he was one, when she obviously could tell he wasn’t.

There were footsteps, and Jughead didn’t know where it was coming from, only that he had a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. If something dangerous were headed in their direction, he didn’t know if he could protect her.

“We have to leave,” he said in an increasingly agitated tone.

She didn’t disagree, but they stared at one another, the panic thickening between them as the footsteps grew closer and an eerie, figure in white began to bob towards them from a distance.

How? How were they going to leave?

Did he just click his heels together three times? What were the rules of interdimensional travel?

She took his hands. “We leave the same way we came here.”

“The mirror.”

She nodded.

“B-But--” Dismay overpowered his fear. “But then we won’t be together.”

“We’ll figure something else out.”

He could hear the urgency in her voice, and he knew she was right. Between the two of them, she had always been the one to come to reason first.

They hurried to reposition themselves on the mirror’s frame, sitting on opposite sides of it.

“How do we do this?” he asked, his stomach tightening with fear as the mysterious figure in the distance picked up its pace. There was no doubting it now. It had seen them and whatever its intentions, Jughead wasn’t keen on finding out whether it was good or bad.

She put her hand up in the air, miming the sheet of glass between them within the mirror’s frame. “Hurry.”

He pressed his palm to hers.

Nothing happened.

The rhythm of the footsteps grew faster, followed by an unearthly scream. They both jumped with terror, but their hands remained pressed together, their connection a comfort in a situation where they had absolutely no alternatives. Her eyes widened with fear.

He couldn’t protect her. He didn’t know what to do. In his desperation, he leaned over, pressing his lips to hers, and he thought that if they were going to die, he was going to fulfill the desire that brought them here in the first place.

Ice seeped from his lips, and the softness of her was gone.

He pulled away, gasping, just as she did.

And once again they were separated, their bodies planted firmly in their respective worlds. She in her softly lit pink room and him in his dark, dusty version of it. They were back in the Cooper house in Elm with a sheet of glass between them.   

“Are you alright?” he asked, his need for her to be safe diluting his disappointment.

He could see the slight bob in her throat and the small tremble of her lip. She nodded. “I was afraid.”

So was he, but as the fear ebbed, the reality that he could no longer touch her began to set in, and he despaired. He leaned his forehead against the mirror, her reflection doing the same, but nothing happened this time, and perhaps it was just as well. They really had no idea what lurked in the In Between.

He ought to be thankful, really, that the universe had given them a taste.

The only downside was that he yearned for her more than ever. The dreams were one thing, but that interlude between space and time--that had been real. The kissing. The touching. The desire. They weren’t following a script. They weren’t reliving some distant, would-be life. It had been them _actually_ being together.

He gave a deep, exhausted sigh. “I wished we could have had more time.”

Her fingers traced his on the mirror’s surface. “Me, too.”

The light from his laptop went dark, its battery drained. It was just as well. “It’s going to happen, Betty. I can feel it. Things are happening, already.”

Soonpoon was right. The universe _was_ listening. It wants to correct its mistake. It was just a matter of time.  

She nodded, her touch never leaving the glass.

 

***************

 

Ethel caught him leaving school.

It was just shortly after he finished lunch, right before the start of class. Students were still milling about in the hallway, leaving things in their lockers and picking other things up.  The bell would be ringing in a few minutes.

She stood beside him as he stuffed some clothes in his locker. He would came back later in the day, while the athletic teams practiced in the field, to use the shower rooms.

“Hi, Jughead.”

His mild surprise was overtaken by his annoyance. “Hey, Ethel. How’s it going?”

She shrugged, fidgeting on her feet. Her hands were shifting her books unnecessarily and he could see a krinkle forming and un-forming between her eyes. “Good. And you? Everything okay?”

It has been three days since he was with Betty in the In Between. They’d tried and tried to get there again, to no avail. Nothing else had changed. None of his other things had leapt across the dimensions. There were no further developments. They were still dreaming the same. He was still writing his non-fiction account of Jason Blossom’s murder. He still ached to hold Betty in his arms.

The other night, he watched as Betty peeled off her sweater. The camisole she wore underneath preserved her modesty, and she was chattering about something she had to do in school, completely unaware of how his mouth watered at the sight of her skin, how he watched the bones shift gracefully along her shoulder blades, and how he wanted to dip his tongue into those hollows. It was excruciating to desire her this way and be unable to do anything about it. He’d never known sexual frustration until then. Things were the opposite of okay.

“Everything’s great.” He slammed his locker shut.

“You--” She paused.

He was trying to be patient. He told himself he just had to get through this conversation, and then he could be on his way.

“N-Never mind,” she finished.

He nodded, hitching his backpack higher on his shoulder and began to walk away. “I’ll see you--”

“You’ve been cutting class,” she finally blurted out. It looked like she was swallowing blades as she said it. “I noticed. I’m a little worried about you, Juggie.”

He frowned. That nickname belonged to no one else but Betty.  “Don’t call me that.”

She looked immediately repentant, her face turning a deep shade of red. “Sorry.”

He was struck by his effect on her and he hated himself for being a complete jerk. He shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. I just--don’t worry about me, okay? I’m good.”

“You haven’t been staying at your uncle’s, have you?”

Irritation bubbled up anew. “Have you been checking up on me?”

 _“No!”_ She held up her hand, as if to forestall any other thought going in that direction. “I mean, I didn’t mean to. I went to your house one time to invite you to come over to mine--I was having some of my friends over for some D&D and I wanted to--well, your uncle said you weren’t there. And then mom--you know, _my mom,_ she told me some guy from social services went to her, asking if she knew your whereabouts because you weren’t at the trailer. I wondered where you’ve been staying, and now--”

His lips pressed together, feeling a little like he was getting backed into a corner. “Stay out of this, Ethel. Tell that to your mother, too.” He didn’t care how mean that sounded. He can’t have her anchoring him to this plane any more than he was.  “I’m fine, okay? I’m actually working towards something better. A way out of this town where I could probably have a better future. I don’t need you getting in the way of that. Do you understand?”

She look stricken, and he wanted to turn and leave. To look away from her hurt, and he was doing just that, but clearly she cared more than he deserved.

“Have you been staying in that haunted house?”

He whipped around on his heel. “It’s not haunted!”

Her surprised expression morphed back into concern. “Oh, my God, you _have._ Are you still trying to get in contact with Betty Cooper’s ghost?”

Somehow, that knocked him back to his senses. Likely because the idea of Betty being a ghost seemed so ridiculous now. Everything since then had gone _way_ beyond ouija boards.

He realized that he didn’t have to answer her questions. He laughed, shook his head, and told her he had to go.

“Jughead,” Ethel called after him. “Betty’s not—there’s no such thing as ghosts!”

“I know that, Ethel,” he said over his shoulder. “Now please just leave me alone!”

He could feel Ethel’s gaze on the back of his head as he walked away, and as much as he wanted to ignore his feelings of foreboding, it persisted.

He went straight to Soonpoon.

 

*******************

 

Soonpoon looked tired of seeing him. The man took one look at him through his shop door and sighed, but he did let Jughead into his store and he did begin to prepare both of them tea.

Jughead didn’t bother to sit. He immediately launched into what he went there for. “I did what you said. I began cutting myself off from my life, and for a few days, it began to work. Things were happening, and then it stopped. No developments have occurred for three whole days, which is the opposite of what I expected since we fell into the In Between.”

Soonpoon froze. “The what?”

“The In Betw—I just call it that, okay? I don’t know what the hell it’s called and—“

Soonpoon frowned and banged his pot over his stove, probably to shut Jughead up.

Jughead abruptly stopped speaking.

“Tell me everything.” Soonpoon demanded, taking his seat behind the table. “From the time your hat jumped through the reality to the—whatever it is you called it.”

Jughead recounted the events leading up to the In Between, leaving out the more intimate parts he and Betty shared. When he got to the part about the disturbance, that’s when Soonpoon began to look agitated.

“Did it see you?” Soonpoon asked.

Jughead was fairly certain it did, but he and Betty hadn’t stuck around to make sure.  Nonetheless, he nodded. “Probably. It was headed straight for us. But we got away--”

“Fuck.”

That was not good.

Soonpoon got on his feet and flew to his shelves. “Crap.” He shuffled through some books.  “If that was a cross dimensional being, and I’m quite sure it was, and it _saw_ you, it will come after you and dispose of you.”

Jughead stood at this alarming news. “Betty--”

“She isn’t in as much danger as you,” Soonpoon said, then paused. “I think.”

_“You think?”_

_“You’re_ the one in the wrong plane,” Soonpoon replied after a second’s pause. “You’re the one it thinks is causing dimensional anomalies. You walked right into its In Between, as you call it, and these beings do not like to share, mostly because those In Betweens tend to be unstable if too many people use it. Cross dimensional beings would rather kill than lose their dimensional ports to someone like you.”

This was a situation that Jughead had never in his wildest dreams thought he would ever be in. “What the fuck do I do?”

“You have to kill it!”

 _“What?_ Oh, my God.”

Soonpoon knocked a few books off his shelf, ruffling through them and pulling out _The Time Machine_ by H.G. Wells.  He opened it and inside was a knife. It looked ornate and shiny, with jeweled stones along its handle. It had a sheath covering it’s blade. “Here. I was given this by a mystic I met in my travels. Allegedly, it’s a piece of a portal fashioned into a blade.”

_“Allegedly?”_

Soonpoon rolled his eyes and shook his head from side to side. “It was a bazaar. Who knows if he was telling the truth?”

Jughead couldn’t believe they had to take the word of some dude selling stuff at a bazaar.

“But Todd McGinty confirms that any weapon smelted from the fabric of time and space will do the job. He’d killed his fair share of cross dimensional beings. If the merchant at the bazaar was telling the truth, this ought to do it. At any rate, it’s not like I can just order cross dimensional weapons from weBay.” He smacked the handle right into Jughead’s palm.

The knife felt hefty in his grip and as he pulled the blade partially out of its sheath, he could see how sharp the edge of it was. He slammed the knife back in its protective cover. He felt a little like crying right now. Weapon in his hand notwithstanding, he was absolutely not equipped for this. “Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit, ho--”

“You need to defend yourself, Jughead,” Soonpoon told him, calmly. “If you don’t kill it first, it will kill _you.”_

He realized he needed to repeat that like a mantra.  

Defeated, he shoved the knife into his backpack and turned to leave. “I gotta go. Thank you for this. If I don’t see you again, I’m either dead or on the other side.”

Soonpoon tilted a smile. “If you ever get there, find Todd. Tell him you made it. He’ll let me know.”

Jughead nodded and left, his backpack heavier from the weight of a knife in it.

 

**********************

 

He told Betty everything Soonpoon told him, and when he showed her the knife, she started to cry, much to his dismay.

“Betty, please don’t,” he begged, softly. “It’s going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that,” she said through her tears. “We don’t even know if that thing is real. It just _looks_ like an fancy knife, Jug. I am powerless to help you and--”

“Betty, you aren’t powerless,” he said, and he meant it. It wasn’t just an empty platitude. “You’ve--you’ve given me something to live for. You’ve made me realize that I don’t have to live a shitty life. And I want, more than anything, to be with you. If I have to run away and hide, I will, because I know I will eventually find my way to you. Do you believe me?”

She bit her lip, probably to staunch her sobs, but she nodded. “You found me across the dimensions and you walked both of us through a mirror. I believe you, Jughead. More than anything in my life.”

All his life people have looked him over. He was either too odd or too uninteresting. He’d wanted that anonymity, which makes her seeing _him_ all the more special. He’d never had anyone believe in him. That, out of everything, was the most powerful thing she could give him.

”That means everything,” he told her.

A tiny smile managed to peek through her tears. “Jug.”

It felt good, he thought, to realize that he could make her smile even when things were so uncertain.

His phone rang and he saw that it was Ethel. He thought about ignoring her, but remembering how mean he had been to her earlier, his guilt began to build at each chime.

Sighing, he picked it up. “Hey, uh, what’s up?” He waved to Betty when she looked at him questioningly.

“Jughead, oh my God, that social services guy met me outside school this afternoon. He was asking about you, wondering where he might find you. I told him I didn’t know, but something--something happened. One second I was talking to him and the next he was just completely gone like--like a ghost! I know that sounds stupid, but I didn’t know who else to tell and I’m _really_ freaked out.”

Jughead’s heart began to hammer in his chest. _Oh, my God. Oh, shit._ “Did you tell him anything? Did you tell him where I was?”

“No! I mean, at least I didn’t think so. He introduced himself as Edgar Evernever. Do you know him?”

“I have no idea who that is. Can you describe him to me?”

“Yeah. Dark blonde hair, tall, trim. And he wore white. _All_ white. That was so strange.”

 _Don’t panic,_ was what he was telling himself, but his hands were shaking, and his brain was scattering. He couldn’t think. If this man was indeed a cross dimensional being, how the hell could Jughead possibly get away from something that could find him across time and space?

“Jug, what is it?” Betty demanded. “You’re shaking.”

He heard a crash from downstairs and Jughead dropped the phone. He could hear Ethel’s tiny voice from the phone and he could see the terror in Betty’s eyes.

“What was that?” Betty asked. “Jughead!”

Jughead scrambled to pick up the knife and he had it barely fitting into his hand when the door burst open and a man in white strode into the room, making a lunge for Jughead.

Betty screamed and Jughead jumped to avoid his attacker, landing on Betty’s bed, where he clumsily rolled off and crashed to the floor, taking the bedside lamp with him.

Jughead felt the lamp falling on him, but he batted it away, scrambling to get off the floor. Maybe they could talk about this like two beings lost in the multiverse. “Edgar? You’re Edgar, right? Let’s talk about this--”

The man loomed large, and he grabbed Jughead by the collar of his shirt, dragging him to his feet as he pulled what looked like a syringe gun from his back.

“Ethel, wasn’t she? They don’t usually recover that quick from mind sweeps,” said the stranger, pushing a button on his weapon. “But here we are. You, Jughead, may call me Mr. Evernever, and if you hold still, this will only hurt a little.”

The liquid inside its glass cartridge glowed silver and Jughead knew that if any of it got in him, he would be finished.  He could hear Betty’s screams through the glass, could see her banging on the mirror’s frame over Edgar’s shoulder.

Jughead had promised her he would be okay and he was going to do everything he can to keep that promise to her.

Jughead felt the hilt of the knife in his hand, and closing his eyes, probably the worse thing he could do in this situation, he thrust the knife towards the man’s chest and felt its blade sinking into flesh. It was a horrible feeling.  

The man’s grip loosened and Jughead pushed him away to put some distance between them.

“Juggie!” Betty cried.  “Juggie, are you--”

 _“Fuck!”_ Jughead crumpled his hair in his fists, horrified at what he had to do. “Shit, Betty! Shit! I just--!”

Edgar was staring at the hilt sticking out of his chest, probably shocked that Jughead had such a weapon on him. He began to stagger forward.

Jughead didn’t know what to say. He saw his phone on the floor, and he realized he had to call the cops. Or Soonpoon. _Someone._ This was a disaster. This was the opposite of erasing himself from this plane.

Edgar fell on one knee and Jughead expected him to fall over in the next second, but someone began to laugh, and Jughead was horrified to realize that the sound was coming from Edgar.

He got up, pulling the knife from his chest and holding it up to examine it. There was no blood on his shirt or on the knife. “And where did you get this little trinket? I hope you didn’t pay a lot for it.”

Jughead could feel his entire body going cold. The knife was a fake. Soonpoon had gotten swindled, and unless Jughead had a better idea, he had to _run._ Now.

“The mirror, Juggie,” Betty told him, her expression hard with resolve. “Use the mirror!”

 _“For what?”_ Did she want him to try to open some kind of portal? He’d done it once, but he didn’t have time to find that quiet space this time.  He didn’t know how to do it quickly.

“The _mirror_ is a portal!” she cried. “It’s a—“

But before Betty could shout anything further, Edgar had picked him up and thrown him with overwhelming force.

He felt weightless, his body curling into itself as he hurtled across the room.

The mirror shattered as he crashed right into it, sending pieces of it to the floor. He huddled as he crashed, protecting himself from the sharp edges of glass.  

Jughead thought he felt it, that severing of him and Betty in the fabric of space. Their connection--their _real_ connection was a pile of broken shards around him.  The dreams they shared that had felt so real now felt like nothing but a ghostly recording, replaying over and over.

To have spoken to Betty for weeks and weeks, through their mirror--that had been real, and to have been _with her_ in the In Between, that was real too. If all he ever had left were the dreams, that was worse than unsatisfying. That was devastating.

He stared at the pieces, his gaze growing liquid with tears. _“No.”_

“When I’m done with you,” Edgar said, smirking at the destruction he’d caused. “I’m going after _her.”_

_Her. Betty. He’s going after Betty._

A new emotion surged through him, eclipsing his grief. His hands balled into fists and he could feel adrenaline pumping throughout his body. His jaw tightened.

Running away now was no longer an option. If he didn’t kill this monster now, wherever Betty was, _whenever_ she was, Edgar Evernever would find her, and possibly kill her.

“If you kill me,” Jughead said. “Any dimensional rift I’m causing will stop. It will stop and you don’t need to go after her.”

“By stepping into my port, you and she took something from my aether. Precious energy that I use to cross, and by killing you this way—“ he hefted his syringe gun “—I release that energy from you so that I can take it back, so hold still.”

Edgar had him in a stranglehold from behind and Jughead could barely get a grip on Edgar’s arm to resist.

He remembered Betty’s last words. _Use the mirror. The mirror is a portal._

The distant voice of Soonpoon drifted across his mind. _“Any weapon smelted from the fabric of time and space will do the job.”_

And he knew what Betty meant by using the mirror, just as the mouth of the gun closed in on his neck.

Jughead’s fingers scrambled desperately for the glass beneath them. When he had one firmly in his grip, he felt its sharp edges bite into his palm, but against all the pain and gasping for breath, Jughead heaved that shard of glass right into Edgar’s thigh behind him.

Edgar gave a yell, his grip on Jughead loosening.

Jughead tore himself away, leaving the piece of mirror embedded into Edgar’s flesh. The angry gash on Jughead’s palm dripped with blood, but he barely realized it, because he was fixated on Edgar’s wound which was glowing as bright as a floodlight.

“You worthless _mistake,”_ Edgar gasped, tearing the shard off him and tossing it to the ground. The light that glared from the stab was blinding and Jughead had to shield his eyes.

Edgar screamed as a bright silver mist began to ooze out of the wound. “You’re an anomaly. An error!” He tried to staunch the substance that was leaving his body, but it seeped through his fingers. “A loose thread in the quilt of time and space.”

Jughead listened to Edgar disparage him, reducing him with words, but all Jughead could think was that the universe had considered him important enough to bring to this moment in time, where a being whose playground was the multiverse, was being destroyed by _him,_ an interdimensional mistake.

Pieces of Edgar began to drift with the mist, the rift in him growing larger, ripping light up his leg, until it cut through Edgar’s chest. His dying screams faded as the light swallowed him completely, dissipating his existence and leaving the room completely and utterly quiet.

The rift hung bright and shimmering in the middle of Betty’s room, and at its core, Jughead could see a familiar void. Black, but not dark. Flat as far as the eye could see.

The sound of a siren pierced his ears and it drew his gaze to the window, where blue and red lights flashed. He hadn’t even realized that it had gotten dark out.

He heard radios crackling and the voices of men and women. It filtered through the window just as Jughead’s instincts kicked in.

He had to go.

Frantically, he began to gather his scattered things from the ground. If he was to run away, he needed those supplies, but his eye caught the piece of glass on the floor, the one that had caused Edgar’s demise, and on it, he could see the blankness of the In Between, reflected unmistakably on its surface. It glinted once in the direction of the rift.

Jughead took note of how none of the other shards behaved the same way, so it wasn’t just a reflection. This shard was different because it had touched Edgar--had taken Edgar’s life.

Using another shirt from his bag, he wrapped his bloodied hand in it and gingerly picked up the piece if glass that saved his life and Betty’s.

It shimmered with color.

“Police! Come out with your hands up!”

It was coming from the bottom of the landing and Jughead didn’t waste anymore time.

He leapt through the rift, his duffle bag and shard of glass in hand.


	6. Pieces of You and Me

**Author's Note: If you haven't read Chapter 5, you've skipped ahead. Go back to chapter 5. ;)**

 

 ****It was a strange place, a cross dimensional being’s In Between. It wasn’t like the quiet serenity of the space he and Betty had found themselves in. There were still huge swaths of voids, but Jughead could see things from afar. He could see the _windows._ He could see the many universes that people lived. He couldn’t tell from the snapshots how they were different, but Jughead was sure they were.

He was also sure that if he walked into one of them, he would never be able to walk back out.  

Even knowing nothing about interdimensional travel, he could feel this In Between slowly collapsing in itself. This was a place constructed by Edgar Evernever, and his destruction would inevitably result in the nonexistence of anything he’d created.

Jughead could only follow the glint on his shard of glass, how it seemed to be pointing him in the direction he needed to go in this vast expanse.

He wasn’t sure how the shard was leading him. He wasn’t even sure if it was what it was doing. It could just be malfunctioning, or it could be leading him somewhere else entirely, but his own theories were all he had to go by and he had to trust himself.

Wherever Betty was, he had to find her, because she believed he would.

He didn’t know how long he searched. Time felt disorienting in the In Between. He didn’t have a watch on him. He never picked his phone off the floor. There were clocks on most of the windows--no doubt deliberate on Edgar’s part to know the time of day in each of the multiverses, but he never lingered to figure that out.

He followed only his shard of glass, pulling him towards a destination he could only hope was the right one.

When after hours, maybe days, of trekking through this In Between, he turned a corner and the shard grew bright with light. When Jughead looked away from the glare, his gaze fell upon _it_.

 _The_ window. _His_ window.

It was a different view of Betty’s room, because her bed was on a different side of the frame. Her back was turned to him and she was kneeling on the floor, shards of glass surrounding her. Her shoulders shook as she picked up pieces from the floor, holding each for a few seconds before moving on to another piece.

As Jughead drew closer, a shard by her knee grew bright with light, and Jughead saw that the piece she took in her hand was identical to the piece he held in his.

“Betty?” he cried out, hoping that she would hear him.  “Betty, can you hear me?”

She seemed to be speaking into the shard, as well, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He could see her mouth moving to the shape of his name, but no sound carried.

She came closer, delicately holding the glowing shard in her hand. She took a seat, and Jughead could only press his hand to the barrier of this window. He recognized the things by her elbow, saw the post-it obscuring the view at the corners. This was her dresser, and as she leaned onto its surface, the shard in her hand, he could see the splotches of red on her cheeks, her swollen eyes, and the desperation on her face.

He began to grow frustrated. _What_ was the point of all this if he couldn’t get to her? How was he supposed to know how to get to where he belonged if they couldn’t even hear each other? The shard in his hand continued to glow, and Jughead figured it was because it was so near its dimensional counterpart.

He stared at it, willing it to tell him what to do, but then he heard _sounds._ It was faint, at first, filtering in his ears so softly that he wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, but the sounds grew louder and the shard flew from his hand.

“Hey!” Jughead cried, rushing to follow it. If he lost this only link to the other side, he wouldn’t know what to do.  

He sprinted after the shard, skidding around corners, and rushing past other windows. He followed frantically after it, his muscles straining. He had never exerted this much physical effort in his life.

The shard glinted and rushed right through a window and before Jughead could stop and think on it, he slipped right on after it, falling through the universe.

 

******************

 

He was sitting in what looked like a diner, his laptop in front of him, and a cup of coffee within reach being refilled by a kindly looking man in a retro-fifties style uniform. His name tag said “Pop”.

“Working late?” Pop asked.

Jughead took a second to acclimate himself, taking in his surroundings. Soft music played from a jukebox, neon lights cast colors through the windows, and the place _smelled_ like burgers. The signs around them said, “Pop’s” and the place was only half filled, though if he were going by the clock hung on the far wall, it was almost 12 midnight.

“Jughead?”

He blinked, looking up at Pop. “I-I’m sorry, what day is it?”

Pop arched an eyebrow. “Saturday? Well--Sunday, almost”

Almost Sunday. The last time he and Betty spoke, it had been a Wednesday evening, which meant they hadn’t spoken in over three days and she’d been worried since.

He slammed his laptop shut and hauled his things into his backpack.  “Uh, how much do I owe--”

Pop looked mildly confused. “Coffee’s always been--”

_On the house for you._

“Right! Sorry!” Jughead interjected before Pop could finish.  He was Pop’s best customer--that is, when he could afford the burgers, which has been oddly frequent of late. How he knew that, he wasn’t sure. Just that at that moment, he did. “I’m just--I gotta go.”

Pop chuckled, as if used to his strange moods. “Say hi to the Sheriff for me, won’t you? Tell him the donuts are free for him if he ever takes up the offer.”

Jughead wondered momentarily why the hell Pop was telling him to say hi to the Sheriff, but the knowledge of things began to filter into his brain.

 _The Sheriff’s your dad._ “U-Um, yeah, of course! I’ll tell him.”

He scrambled out of the booth, rushing past Pop and pushing through the chiming doors. He hurried down the steps, almost going past the parking lot, when he saw a familiar motorcycle parked to the side. Perched on its seat was a helmet with a crown carved into the front of it.

He checked his pocket and pulled out a key.

The key fit right on the motorcycle’s ignition, which was expected, and he kicked the stand out from beneath it as the motorcycle roared to life.

 

*******************

 

The house on Elm was quiet but for the light in Betty’s bedroom.  He knew she was there. Knew that her mother would be asleep. Knew where the ladder to her window was.

He wondered, too, if Betty would know him as a fixture in this universe, or if this was the Betty who met a strange boy through a looking glass.

Would it matter?

_Of course it would._

Her window was wide open.

Did he dare?  

Looking around him at the darkened houses, he quietly made his way to the shed, pulled out the ladder and leaned it against Betty’s bedroom window.

If this Betty pushed off his ladder and he broke his neck in the fall, it was just as well. She wouldn’t be the Betty he knew and he didn’t know if he could cope with that.  He didn’t know if he could live with that reality.

When her window was within reach, he braced himself and peered inside.

She was asleep, her hair splayed on the pillow, and for a moment, all he could think was that if he found out that this Betty didn’t know him, if this wasn’t _his_ Betty, he should leave and let this new story play out. Maybe he could meet her some other way--let the memory be a nice one instead of something as traumatic as a strange boy breaking and entering through her bedroom window.

He couldn’t imagine, anyway, that this Betty would be much different from the one he already knew and loved. He couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t love this one, too, even as his heart broke for the Betty that he couldn’t get back to.

He sighed, shaking his head. If this Betty was different, he would always think of the one out there, weeping at the broken shards of glass on her bedroom floor.

But then he saw it--the mirror, or what was left of it. The glass was mostly gone, the frame left standing.  A bit of the glass remained, perhaps in the off chance that maybe she would see him through that little bit again…

His gaze moved to the dresser, where the glint of a shard caught his eye.  

This was her. This was his Betty, and only then did he feel like he was where he _finally should be_.

Betty shifted on her bed, turning at the sound of his ladder scraping at the edge of her window.

She froze at the sight of him, shock evident in her gaze, but in her hands, he spied his beanie, and his emotions overwhelmed him.

Before he could think on it, he spoke the words he knew first brought them together. “Hey there, Juliet. Nurse off duty?”

And then she was hauling him through her window, with her fingers curled tightly around the collar of his jacket and her lips pressing firmly upon his.   

Her lips were as soft as he remembered them to be. Her scent filled his senses, and the shape of her in his hands, the feel of her palms against his face, felt familiar. He fit. They fit. Like two pieces in a cross-dimensional puzzle.

There was still a lot to talk about. Still so many questions left unanswered, but for now he wanted nothing but to be in her presence, absorbing the reality that this wasn’t a dream and that there was no sheet of glass between them.

He whispered her name against her lips, and perhaps she remembered something, too. Their first shared dream.

“Stay.” she breathed. _“Stay…”_

He wasn’t going anywhere, because at long last, he was exactly where he belonged.  

 

 

_fin_


End file.
